A couple months ago I decided I would begin working toward my long time dream of producing a real-time strategy game. I actually finished NorthStar and had this written a few weeks later, but I’m only posting now because I’ve been hard at work with the rest of the game! Now working on unit logic along with a new Sokay project (more on that later) and editing a new film (later still), so I been a little busy. Expect Demos.

I planned on basing the RTS engine on some of my previous work with physics (perhaps that sounds strange, but it makes sense). Step one was coming up with a pathfinder.

Demands:

1. Irregular Polygons: I dislike tile-based systems and I already had groundwork in my physics engine for handling irregular polygons. I decided the RTS should implement the same ideas and therefore it cannot use traditional, tile-based pathfinding techniques.
2. The Illusion of Intelligence: Paths must appear to have resulted from intelligent decision-making. I didn’t want to see units going on crazy birdwalks for no apparent reason like they often do in popular RTSes. I’m disgusted by the presence of such awful pathfinding in blockbusters like Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft series. I want my units to use paths that make them appear intelligent.
3. Forethought in Navigation: The path must be relatively efficient, demonstrating a knowledge of the overall terrain unless I specify otherwise.  If I want a unit to appear ignorant or lost, letting it wander is fine, otherwise it should not bother with any path that will not eventually lead it to the goal.
4. Efficiency: I can’t have units lagging every time they decide to move somewhere and ideally I can have lots of units deciding to move to different places all at the same time. That means it’s gotta be quick.

A* Logic

I didn’t have any background in pathfinder’s, but Bryson had used the popular A* (”A star”) for his Liquid Generation puzzle game a while back and it seemed to work well for him.

The essence of A* is decision-making. It navigates a network of nodes by rating each one available and selecting the node with the best rating (making it a “best-first” algorithm). The rating function can be customized for a given project, but generally it is an optimistic estimation of the cost (in distance) of a path through a given node.

So imagine you have to walk around a car. The car may have one node on the left and another node on the right. If walking through the left node costs at least 15 steps, but walking on the right costs at least 10 steps, A* chooses to go right. It is “optimistic” in that walking to the right may eventually cost more than 10 steps, but walking to the left will cost at least 15 steps.

A*’s simplicity and effectiveness made it a good model from which to build NorthStar. But the reason A* is so easy to implement in so many games is because its nodes directly translate into tiles in a tile-based engine. I needed a way to describe a field of arbitrary polygons as nodes before I could apply any of that logic. This proved to be the real challenge.

Creating a Node Network from Arbitrary Polygons

Polygon Data

Using my old physics engine systems, I constructed polygons from movieClip points organized into groups. I drop the point movieClips onto the stage and convert groups of them into new movieClip instances, then the points automatically arrange their data into arrays at run-time. The result is a single array (_root.PolygonArray) indexing each individual polygon (_root.PolygonArray[p]) which are represented as arrays indexing vertices (_root.PolygonArray[p][v]) which are also arrays containing x and y values of the points (_root.PolygonArray[p][v].x , _root.PolygonArray[p][v].y). This is the polygon data I’m converting into nodes.

Some pathfinder’s handle this process by identifying all vertices as nodes and creating links between all of them that have no walls between them. That works, but it creates a very wasteful network. A pathfinder has to scan through all the options available before it can make a decision, therefore the pathfinder works most quickly with the least number of options. So yes, you can simply convert all polygon corners into nodes and link them all, but your pathfinder will be much more effective if you only create the most useful links. Plus, having extra links lying around may occasionally put pointless Sunday strolls in your path instead of keeping it nice and tight.

If a link is unnecessary, don’t create it! Having extra links around will just bog down your pathfinder while it scans the entire network for the best path.

Identifying a Good Link

I came up with this set of steps for determining whether or not a pair of nodes (A and B) should be linked to one another (read Filtering Links for a Lean Network for justification):

1. Draw a line connecting vertex A to vertex B. Call this “lineAB”
2. Find the two vertices neighboring vertex A and make sure they are both on the same side of lineAB.
3. Find the two vertices neighboring vertex B and make sure they are both on the same side of lineAB. (They do not need to be on the same side as vertex A’s neighbors)
4. Check for polygon walls blocking lineAB.

If each node’s neighbors are to one side of the link and no polygon walls are penetrated by it, the link is worth having.

The Math

You may be wondering how I applied those steps mathematically. To “Draw a line” between vertices A and B, I found the line in Slope-Intercept form that contains the two. To find out if their respective neighbors were on the same side of that line, I ran the x values for each neighboring vertex through the line’s equation. The result is the y value of a point (call it pointL) on the line with the same x value as the neighbor. If pointL has a y value that is greater than the a neighbor’s y value, it means that neighbor is below the line. If pointL has a smaller y value than the neighbor, the neighbor is above the line.

The only exception to this is when the slope of the line is Infinity (it points straight up and down when the 2 nodes being tested have the same x value and different y values). In this case, because the 2 nodes being tested have the same x values, you can detect which side each pair of neighbors is on by comparing their x values to the x value of either of the 2 nodes being tested.

Organizing Node and Link Data

I arranged link information in a new array called “nodeMap” which indexes each individual node. Each node is an array with point information in addition to being associated with a “link” array (nodeMap[n].link). The “link” array lists each of the nodes to which the current node is linked (nodeMap[n].link[m]). Each element in the “link” array is an array containing a reference to the linked node (at the zero position, [0]), and the distance between the two nodes (at [1]). A pair of linked nodes must have a reference to each other otherwise the link will only work in one direction.

The nodeMap grows as loops cycle through every vertex on every polygon, checking them against every other vertex in the field, converting polygon data into node data.

Pathfinding

Linking the Start and End Points to the Network

Now that the polygon map has been converted into a node map, the pathfinder must be given start and end points to represent the desired movement. These points can be anywhere on the field.

NorthStar uses logic just like the node linking process to link the start and end points to the node network. The start and end points are not vertices so they do not need to compliment any nodes to form a link and their linking process is a bit simpler than detecting links between nodes.

1. Draw a line connecting startPoint to node A. Call this “lineSA”
2. Find the two vertices neighboring node A and make sure they are both on the same side of lineSA.
3. Check for polygon walls blocking lineSA.

(Run the same process with the endPoint in place of the startPoint.)

Finally, the network is ready to be analyzed.

Blazing the Path

Starting from the startPoint, a path is drawn from one node to the next, through link after link, until a node is reached that is linked to the endPoint. When the endpoint has been reached, the search is over. The path has been found.

NorthStar is continually updating a library of available options, starting with each of the links of the startPoint. Each time it moves from one node to another, it deletes the new node from its library of options and adds all of that node’s links to the library (except the one it came from).

When selecting the next node, it sorts the entire library by node rating. The one with the best rating is chosen to have its path grown until that path attains a worse rating than another option in the library. All available nodes are constantly checked against one-another so that NorthStar quickly abandon’s any paths that seem wasteful and returns to old paths with better ratings.

The Rating System

Breeding A* with a few other methods, I rated nodes according to an estimated cost in distance in addition to a few tie-breakers and special cases that would probably change from project to project.

I put rating data into arrays (you can probably tell I use arrays a lot). The first element in the rating array is the path distance required to get to the node. The second element is the estimated distance to the endPoint. These two are added together to get a rating value.

In most cases the estimated distance to the endPoint may simply be the distance of a straight path between the node and the endPoint (an optimistic estimation), however if possible, other information may be used to find an exact distance, like when the current node is indirectly linked to the endPoint. An indirect link is when a node can lead to the endPoint if at least one other node is used between the two.

Indirect Links

I implemented a check for indirect links into my rating system. It just scans to see if there are any links that a node has in common with the endPoint, then selects the one with the shortest path (if one or more exist). When this is used, the resulting rating is exact rather than an estimation.

Another way of taking advantage of indirect links is to create them between nodes as soon as a path is found between them. If the path has already been proven to be effective, you can indirectly link all the nodes within that path to each other and the path can be easily reused in the future without requiring a complete rescan of the network. I did this by adding a third element to any links between nodes that are indirect. This element is an array containing all nodes along the path between the two indirectly linked nodes, in order.

Finding Indirect Links Pre-emptively

I have a function for scanning a node network ahead of time to find all the shortest indirect links between all nodes on the field, but it’s a little buggy. With that implemented a ton of time can be saved because as soon as the start and end points have been linked to the network, you can instantly find a path between them by picking any of the nodes they’re linked to and finding the precalculated indirect link between those two nodes.

Why is the path so close to the obstacles?

Fair question. I haven’t bothered with checking unit thickness yet, so right now the path goes right up against walls and corners (offset by 1 pixel, just so it’s always clear when a unit is outside or inside a polygon).

There are 3 ways to solve this problem:

1. The Ugly Way: Make the art for the obstacles smaller than the actual boundaries. Voila.
2. The Bad Way: Add an outward extension to node locations by a given distance (equal to the radius of your unit). You may want to make that distance a value you can easily change so you can have units of different sizes.
3. The Good Way: This requires that you do the same as in #2, but you also run checks to find out if the units have enough room to fit through all of the passages. Your pathfinder will have to ignore passages that are too thin to fit through. Do this and you never have to worry about units penetrating walls as they walk. (I’ve postponed this, using The Ugly Way in the meantime)

Result

As you can see in the demo, NorthStar’s workin quite well. It’s not 100% bug-free yet, but I’m very pleased with the results and it can easily be implemented into some games. After optimizing it some more, I’m confident I can have it running quick enough that it can be used for pathfinding in pretty huge settings. One method I haven’t seen in other pathfinders would involve generalizing start and end points so you don’t have to calculate linking them to the network so often.

More posts comin.

-Christopher J. Rock

Filtering Links for a Lean Network

The only way to clean up our network is to set up some rules for identifying a useful node link. Our pathfinder will work from the startPoint to the endPoint, but that order is not necessary. If we find a good path, it shouldn’t matter whether it started from the startPoint and worked to the endPoint or started at the endPoint and worked to the startPoint. Keep this in mind when I refer to “direct access” between points. If point A has direct access to point B, point B has direct access to point A.

1. Links cannot penetrate polygon walls: Since you don’t want paths that lead directly through your polygons, you must check to see if a wall is blocking the path between a pair of nodes before declaring them linked.
2. Nodes are only important as potential waypoints: Say you’re traveling from startPoint to endPoint. If an obstacle is blocking the way, you must find a waypoint with direct access to startPoint and endPoint. However, if startPoint has direct access to endPoint, it is unnecessary to use any waypoints when moving between them. Therefore, linking to a node is only useful if the node has direct access to a place that you currently do not. This rule describes finding links to your start and end points.
3. All vertices must be recognized as nodes: Vertices are formed by walls. Walls block nodes from directly accessing areas of the field, but when two walls form a vertex, they do not block that vertex from accessing any point on the field. Therefore, a vertex formed by any two walls will be useful in providing access to spaces around those walls.
4. Nodes must compliment each other: When the startPoint does not have access to the endPoint and linking to a single node achieves access, only 1 node is necessary. But if that node also has no access to the endPoint, it must use a 2nd node to achieve it. If the startPoint has direct access to this 2nd node, the 1st node can be skipped. In this case, the nodes do not compliment each other. On the other hand, if the startPoint does not have direct access to the 2nd node, it must use the 1st node to obtain it. Another way of looking at it is to say that the 1st node must have direct access to an area that the 2nd node does not (the startPoint) and the 2nd node must have direct access to an area the 1st node does not (the endPoint). The nodes must be linked to share their potential as waypoints. In this way, the pair of nodes compliment each other.
5. Nodes will only form links on one side of their vertex: Every vertex forms a “V” shape pointing in some direction. As a result of rules 1 and 2, a node can only have links on the outside of the “V”. Therefore, vertices pointing into the polygon can be labeled “internal” because they will only link to other nodes within that polygon. External vertices, pointing out from the polygon, are only linked to nodes on the outside of the polygon.

There’s an article on the Fangoria horror magazine’s site about a comic my homeboy Ramiro Roman Jr. is working on. It’s a project by writer/director Robert Parigi, which he describes as such…

It’s about a decadent high-school girl who finds a bizarre artifact in the exacavation for her new swimming pool. She uses the relic to enhance her sex-and-drug parties, triggering a plague of supernatural mutations.

This is the first info I’ve seen on it and I’m looking forward to feeling uncomfortable again. You can check out some of Ramiro’s solo comics at his site.

• Platforms: Xbox360 and PlayStation3
• Developer: Rockstar North
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Release: April 29th, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV is a game about living the American dream. You work hard to make money to get the things you want. You meet people and exchange favors for favors in pursuit of a better life for yourself and those you care for. Hard work will eventually payoff and you can fight your way to the top in this country. Eating your enemies along the way. The difference from the traditional interpretation of the American dream is that in GTA IV you’ve decided on a life of crime to make it all happen. Which is against the norm and deemed a bad thing in most cultures. I suppose it may be unfortunate that it makes such an unbelievably awesome experience.

This game is unbelievable to me not only because of the violence or deviancy — for if that were all there was to it then the series would’ve been long forgotten about. What’s unbelievable is the grand scale of it. And not only that but the level of polish that every element has. It’s really amazing! Earlier in the series there were a lot of obvious flaws to complain about, like the sucky control or the subpar graphics. It seems that having a solid foundation of gameplay, an incredibly talented team, great management, and a shitload of cash can result in a masterpiece like GTA IV. I almost didn’t think it was possible to have a big-budget game this good anymore after the disappointment of Halo 3 and the absolute tragedy that was Assassin’s Creed.

Visuals

The visuals are astounding but one thing that bugged me almost immediately was the shadows in the game cast by the sun, the edges tend to artifact pretty nasty like. That’s so unfortunate because you’ll notice that from beginning to end. Besides that the game is consistently pseudo-photo-realistic. You’re not going to mistake it for real life but game is simply gorgeous. How do they stream so much data??

I have to say a few things subtle things I’ve noticed about the animation. I like the way they handled running up and down stairs. Nico takes each step individually, shifting his hips a bit so doesn’t fall. Knock someone down onto the stairs and they fall procedurally down the steps thanks to Euphoria physics. Yeah, that’s pretty “next-gen” to me. There’s also an incredible amount of cinema animation by the fine folks at Image Metrics — them and their fancy motion capture technology.

Story

The writing for this series has always impressed me. Not that it’s Oscar-caliber (give me a break) but it’s more creative than you generally see in games. The first GTA I played was part 3 and I appreciated the satirical take on American culture. I can’t think of any other mainstream game that has any opinion about real-world issues. Characters are flat but interesting. There’s a good balance of characters that you’ll like and those that you’ll hate. The scenarios you wind up in are fun and support the gameplay although the excuses are almost always ridiculous (You want me to take out everyone at a construction site just to end a labor dispute??). It’s fun but often it’s very stupid, which is acceptable for a video game.

Something that disappoints me is that the main character lacks development. He acts cooler than everybody else in the story, and generally does what you would expect the hero to do, so that by default makes him likable. Even then, he’s still pretty flat character. He’s a “soldier with a mysterious past” which is used as an excuse to say little about him which feels to me like a lame cop out. He starts the game with this “I don’t take shit” persona and I knew from the beginning of the game that he’s going to end the game being the exact same person. Solving any possible problem in his life with a gun. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m a good deal into the game and so far it’s living up to my prediction.

In addition to the main plot, the game is filled with an amazing amount of content that fleshes out the world. If you’ve played any of the GTA games before you’d be familiar with its radio stations. Not only do they play music but there are skits interspersed throughout them in the form of radio shows and commercials. The skits make fun of a lot of the ridiculous things going on in American culture, such as parodies of how ridiculous pharmaceuticals are getting. In addition to the radio, they’ve added television and the internet with this game. Television has a handful of shows which are animated shorts that are actually pretty funny. There’s one that parodies those stupid professional poker TV shows (It’s a 3!!! It’s a 3!!! Whoa, didn’t see that one coming. Who would have guessed??). There’s also a ton of content on the internet. You can check e-mail, read news, use a dating website, download ringtones, etc. A cool thing that they’ve added to help immerse you in the world is that after you commit some ridiculous crime news, stories that describe the event will pop up on the radio and on the internet. An awesome bit of detail.

Design

This game keeps you wanting more and keeps surprising you along the way. I’m 25 hours into it and I still feel iffy about writing too much about this game because it’s still introducing cool stuff. I just finished the bank robbery scenario and not only it was a cool dramatic sequence that pumped me up, it finally made me appreciate the improvements to the gunplay in the game by dropping me into this huge battle with the police. It’s still no Gears of War as far as intuitiveness goes, but the improvements to the aiming system are much appreciated.

Sound Design

I was tripping out when I heard the echo of gunshots in a warehouse gunfight. I’ve been to shooting ranges before and that’s exactly what a gun sounds like in an enclosed area like that! There’s so much attention to detail that I can’t believe it. At times when you get a call while you’re driving, the car’s radio will get all staticky before the phone rings. So awesome. Another notable thing is when you’ve got a wanted level and the police are pursuing you, they’ll give a description of your car over the radio. Sometimes they’ll start very vague (A red sedan) and eventually use the actual car name.

Music

The music selection is brilliant, as usual. They hand-picked a fine selection of music from all over the place. The soundtracks is worth listening to as a stand-alone album. It’s good that they’ve continued to put together a fine soundtrack even though game consoles allows you to listen to whatever you want while playing nowadays.

Final Words

$60 games are quite the investment. Especially when you’re like most gamers I know who have stacks of games they haven’t beaten. This is one of the first games of this generation that I’ve been telling everyone “you’ve gotta play this game!”. It doesn’t matter if you like racing games, RPGs, FPS’, or whatever — you’ve gotta play this game! It’s something very different and it feels like a step forward with gaming. And it’s not a short game either, with the length you definitely get your money’s worth. The online mode’s pretty fun as well, although I’ve had some problems connecting to friends. It’s not a perfect game, there’s plenty of room for improvement, which leaves Rockstar something to add for the expansions and spin-offs that will inevitably follow this release.

I feel sorry for the publishers/developers that feel that they have create a $100 million title to compete directly with this game. It’s the solid foundation of the GTA series that allowed them to scale out a game like this and know that the gameplay was going to work. I was disappointed with what I’ve played of Assassin’s Creed but I believe the designers had the problem of not knowing what was going to make a fun game. It’s really unfortunate because the game had so many wonderful things going for it, it just should’ve been scaled down to a reasonable level and polished to perfection. While I’m all for independent games and experimental gameplay — I can’t get enough of these types of games that really push the technical power of hardware in a creative way.

My Papervision Demo

This scene is composed of 4 planes — the cop, the sidewalk, the shop, and the city. I positioned them within the scene with code. The animation is handled with code as well. I’m using Tweener to move the cop left and right, as well as his jump animation. The camera is targeting the cop.

I’m going to keep playing with this. I want to push it further by adding some movement to the rest of the scene, perhaps tweaking the rotation of the buildings as the camera moves.

If you’re looking to start with Papervision, there are some excellent video tutorials at gotoandlearn.com that’ll help you get started.

The Eco Zoo

This is the best executed 3d Flash site I’ve seen so far. Just check it out. Apparently this isn’t created with any open source 3d engine out there, it’s a custom engine by this guy.

3D on the web is sort of a gimmick right now, as Flash itself was seen as a gimmick in the past (i.e. your site wasn’t cool unless it had a Flash intro). All it really takes is some progressive individuals to define what’s possible with the advances of the medium — beyond spinning cubes and globes. Right now I see opportunities to tell stories in new and exciting ways. I’m hoping to take design elements from motion graphics and create interactive visual masterpieces. Couldn’t you imagine CartoonNetwork.com as a fully interactive playground? Kids would love that stuff. How come we aren’t seeing that yet??

May it be the first of many.
-Christopher J. Rock

Clint Hannaford’s Papervision Character demo

I’ve been dabbling in Papervision stuff lately. It’s an extra layer of complication on top of AS3 but the payoff is worth it. I created a model in Maya, textured it, and loaded it into Flash and made it interactive. Unbelievable…

For animation, I figured I could either setup some complicated character rig by separating the character at the joints and linking the pieces together. Setting all of that up and creating a system to animate the keyframes would be much to time consuming. The second idea I heard on Flashkit from renderhjs. He was creating his own custom system of animating the character in the 3d software and exporting the animation frame by frame and playing through the keyframes. I don’t exactly have time to figure that out either so I found Clint’s post searching Google in distress.

Clint explained to me that his character demo uses .md2 format, from Quake 2. It’s similar to, if not the same as, renderhjs’ method of character animation. He linked to this Papervision md2 parser and recommended that I try loading in some Quake 2 models and seeing how it works.

Dino Run: I found this beauty c/o the blog over at indiegames.com and I was very impressed with PixelJam’s work. I’d label it under the Sonic the Hedgehog genre of games, one I’d like to play more of. It’s a full game with a lot to play with. The look and feel is nice, some of the physics are a tad weak, but they do the job and beat the norm. I love the tension, the atmosphere of fleeing. It would be excellent setting for a simple story because the nature of a chase is that it is linear. Not to say that stories must be linear, but game-stories tend to be (due to laziness). Unfortunately, the game is lacking in the story department, but it’s alright because it does well everywhere else. GO PLAY IT.

Warlords: I was linked to this piece from Ben Olding after playing Dino Run and was really surprised by such a simple design adds up to strategy on multiple levels. It’s not only about unit selection, but timing, and tactics as well. Again, the game has tons built into it: multiple races and unit types, unlockable races and unit types, leveling-up, a filled out campaign mode and the unit purchasing/upgrading system really gives players a place to craft a style of play. It’s all very simple, but the game is much more than the sum of its parts. PLAY THIS ONE TOO.

As a bonus, each of these games has a form of multiplayer. Dino Run is actual online play and Warlords allows 2 people to play on the same keyboard. Both options are pretty cool if you ask me.

Man, it’s nice to find good games.

-Christopher J. Rock

This is a trailer for my thesis film at CSULB. Its my latest work and will be completed over this next summer. You can watch it in full screen and at a higher resolution at YouTube.

I’m taking a lot inspiration from Soviet propaganda filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

Shooting started at the end of last semester when we did all of the live action footage, then miniatures and effect shots were done in April. Now I have many hours to spend editing and scoring the whole thing. It’ll add up to a great lot of sweat, but definitely worth it.

From the start I aimed for a film along the lines of early Soviet propaganda films, though a variety of influences found their way in. The some of the effects remind me of a Melies kind of approach, though I hadn’t planned it.

It was shot with the Panasonic AG-HVX200, which I’ve loved using. The format is HD/24p with DVC Pro compression. Many of the shots had their color completely removed and were recolored in post. This, I believe, gives them a look like early painted films (when the only color in film was done by hand). It is being edited in Final Cut Pro and the visual effects I’m using most often are “Threshold” and “Color Balance.” They’re very simple effects, but very powerful.

The current soundtrack will be the basis for the final score which I played on my guitar to hurry out some sound for this trailer. I plan the final score to include a number of other instruments in addition to the guitar. Other songs have been drafted as well, but this is the most representative of the film’s overall feel.

Now I leave you with the recently discovered, final film of the great Ingmar Bergman:

-Christopher J. Rock

While you were too busy playing GTAIV, Nintendo launched the “Nintendo Channel” for the Wii. As per usual Wii owners can download the new channel for free from the online shop. With it, you can stream videos of game previews or (as is the case for WiiFit) interviews with developers. You can also download game demos for your Nintendo DS and of course Nintendo has given us the power to volunteer market information.

The video content is nothing special, especially without exclusives, but the Nintendo channel will not only be used by Nintendo. 3rd party companies can have their content available on the channel, which may help publicize games that may otherwise remain obscure. It’s also a smart way for Nintendo to court 3rd party developers. As it stands there are plenty of videos up.

I tried out a Demo of a Ninja Gaiden game by taking advantage of the miraculously wireless connection between the DS and the Wii. The functionality was awesome, though the game itself was kinda lame. I was surprised to see a good list of demos available so quickly, but I’m sure their efforts will pay off. I for one spotted a number of games I’ve been interested in, but definitely would not buy without getting to test them out. Must return to those later.

It’s nice to see Nintendo taking steps toward an online presence akin to XBNA, baby-steps as they may be. Hopefully they’ve learned some lessons from Microsoft and can make improvements. It appears clear that Nintendo will have higher standards for Wiiware than Microsoft has had for its XBNA titles, and obviously they’re playing with this online demo concept, each of which point to a better online environment for players and developers alike. It’s just too bad that Wiis will be limited by their built-in memory capacities (unlike X-Boxes with their giant hard drives). I’m about ready to pop-in an SD card so I can keep downloading games.

The power to download games straight to the DS made me wonder about the indie possibilities. For now, the downloaded game is only saved to the DS’ ram so it’s lost as soon as you stop playing, but what if that was changed? Imagine being able to download games to blank card in the SD slot, or even a cartridge in the GBA slot. Nintendo can potentially open up the two most popular consoles of our time to a totally indie market just by allowing the small developers already preparing for the Wiiware venue to take advantage of the DS. And of course there is the orphan world of flash.

Nintendo still hasn’t made good on its promise to give the Wii full flash compatibility. They said they were giving it to us, but it was busted and now flash can’t use any Wii functions unless you go through an overly complicated connection to Java with constant server check-ups (ala Wiicade). Hand over button functionality, hand over accelerometer data, and open up the Wii to a boundless new world of free content. Then, if dreams can come true, extend that compatibility to the DS and allow for each console to download and save games permanently.

Maybe that won’t ever happen. It might be too great a risk for a conservative company like Nintendo to take, but I’m hoping they’re forward thinking enough to try it. If you ask me, indie development for the X-Box or PS3 isn’t anything special. You can’t do much on those consoles that you can’t already do on a computer with the old keyboard and mouse. The Wii and DS however would allow for an explosion in innovative development and maybe even give someone other than Miyamoto the chance to master those playgrounds.

For now the Wii is still Nintendo’s turf, but slowly they’re breaking down the iron curtain.

Oh, and lest I forget, Nintendo is also using this channel to shamelessly collect market data. Not that I mind. In fact I somewhat enjoy looking over the list of my games they’ve compiled and telling them the age and gender of the person that plays them the most. Then there’s rating the game to the sound of a drum roll; now that’s excitement! And my favorite part is seeing the data. Taking a lesson from the Everybody Votes Channel, Nintendo makes market analysis fun! Therefore, we all participate for free. Quite a brilliant plan, really. And I only mean this to sound half-way sarcastic; I’m serious about enjoying it.

Apparently Nintendo will be sending me messages regarding new content and will analyze my habits to determine which content I’m most likely to enjoy. This is potentially cool, but most likely annoying. Fortunately you can turn this off at any time, so I’ll let it run and see how badly it spams my message board.

I just hope the Viagra guys don’t find their way in. . . .

-Christopher J. Rock