Thimbleweed Park Podcast #15

by Ron Gilbert
Jul 25, 2015

Our most boring podcast yet... or is it? Yes... yes it is.

You can also subscribe to the Thimbleweed Park Podcast RSS feed if that's 'your thing'.

- Ron

Andrew Bryan - Jul 25, 2015 at 13:02

A few weeks ago we weren't even sure if dialog trees were going to be part of the game, but now it seems like Ron has spent much of the last two weeks just writing dialog (presumably of the tree variety). Were trees a consideration for the last budget? If not, what is going to be the impact on the budget and timeline? We should have a pretty good idea by now, right?

RandomGuy - Jul 25, 2015 at 13:41

Ron said something about DirectX for the Windows version. Why are you using DirectX en not OpenGL? For all the other platforms I assume you're using OpenGl. I guess this makes porting the engine harder. Or am I wrong about that?

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Jul 25, 2015 at 13:45

I don't want people to have to deal with OpenGL on windows. It's spotty at best. DX isn't that hard to do and it will work seamlessly for Windows users. The engine was designed to be cross-platform and it should be done next week.

Davide - Jul 26, 2015 at 16:37

What you mean with "have to deal with OpenGL on windows" and "spotty at best"?
OpenGL works out-of-the-box on Windows, as it is part of regular GPU drivers.

Davide - Jul 26, 2015 at 17:04

Oh, nevermind, you want to support people that doesn't install GPU drivers.

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Jul 26, 2015 at 17:44

Yeah, I need to support people who don't know what a video driver is.

Jammet - Jul 27, 2015 at 00:13

C64 Version comfirmed! :D

julio - Jul 25, 2015 at 13:52

Will the killer be revealed? Will the game end on a cliffhanger?

Mattias Cedervall - Jul 26, 2015 at 00:08

It could be a serial suicider...

RandomGuy - Jul 25, 2015 at 13:58

Thanks for the quick answer!
How is OpenGl so crappy on Windows?
Is it because of some opengl features? Or is it driver issues in Windows?
And why is it heavily used on other platforms (ios, android)?

Retired Ninja - Jul 25, 2015 at 14:49

The OpenGL issue on Windows is mostly driver issues. We see people with high spec machines running Windows 7 or 8 that don't support OpenGL 3 (4.5 is current) because of bad or old video drivers that they either can't update because they don't know how or new drivers aren't easily available, or they just don't. Some don't even support OpenGL 2.1 which is our bare minimum. Sometimes the driver reports it supports a particular level but actually doesn't.

DirectX at least gives you a semi-level playing field since it's an OS requirement. Android and IOS are much better since it's an OS thing and not a video driver lottery like Windows.

RandomGuy - Jul 25, 2015 at 16:12

Thanks for explaining!

Mattias Cedervall - Jul 25, 2015 at 14:06

To clean my apartment is boring (and dangerous) so I gladly listened to you guys instead! I was hoping you would have a big budget increase by now with the help of money coming from PayPal after the Kickstarter campaign. I bought the game there in January for example.

Arto - Jul 25, 2015 at 14:14

Oh god. I had a quick nap before the podcast, stood in a cold shower through the podcast, drank five cups of coffee during it and had a daylight spot aimed at my face the whole time, and I still fell asleep.

No, it was interesting. I actually laughed twice.

I had a theory before that Mark Ferrari is a fictional character or alias for a group of people, and you just confirmed this theory by making it a 'as if'. Cloaking with a joke :)

PS.
"Seckrit Question was wrong! Please try again!"
Damn these Seckrit Questions to post. I have a supercomputer to calculate these.

Natalija - Jul 25, 2015 at 14:42

Yes,yes it is. Next time ,you should probably do one on Friday. Why didn't you do it on Friday?!!

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Jul 25, 2015 at 14:54

We recorded it on Friday, then I got really busy and didn't put it up until this morning.

Natalija - Jul 25, 2015 at 17:19

Oh,ok than. :-D.

Darkstorm - Jul 25, 2015 at 15:42

No Mark again

heh, this is beginning to feel like waiting for godot

Arto - Jul 25, 2015 at 16:03

There is no Mark. X spots the Mark.

PS. Either I'm reeeeeally bad at maths, or in English (either one is plausible), but I never guess the right answer for the Seckrit Question on first try. Second guess is always ok.

Mattias Cedervall - Jul 25, 2015 at 16:44

I think there's a timer so if we take too long to type, then the seckrit question will reset.

Dominik - Jul 25, 2015 at 16:12

Boring podcast? Wuuuut?! It contained the "Mark Ferrari Conspiracy" - that's not Boring at all!

Today, no questions! But (probably repeating myself): It's so great to hear you guys talked not only about your work but about the blog and comment section. It's a really nice connection and doesn't feel like a one-way-street.

Thank for caring so much about this project!

PS: Still need the Info where to send all the beautiful coins for the perk upgrade! :-)

Paulup - Jul 25, 2015 at 20:44

Glad to see the Mark Ferrari conspiracy theory I floated in the comments of "Thimbleweed Park Podcast #13" finally getting some mainstream recognition.

Also notice how David's startling "co-op of artists" theory was quickly brushed aside and downplayed by Ron and Gary. Definitely some food for thought for us Mark Ferrari deniers there.

Plus the name "Mark Ferrari" is the sort of cool but implausible name you would give an alias. The introduction of a new coder named "Fred Lamborghini" would certainly raise some eyebrows at this stage.

Peter Campbell - Jul 26, 2015 at 23:39

Has anyone ever seen both Gary and Mark in the same room at the same time? That's what I thought ^_^

Mattias Cedervall - Jul 27, 2015 at 00:48

No, not even in the same chat room...!

Paulup - Jul 27, 2015 at 11:39

Gary could well be Ron, Mark, and David.
Which means he's really good at doing different voices and is just talking to himself in the podcasts, but he hasn't come up with a voice for Mark yet.

Very Andy Kaufman-esque.

Mario - Jul 26, 2015 at 04:58

@RON,GARY,DAVID,MARK: when you are connected to the net, i hope your work / pc cant be hacked and leaked. do you have any counter measures for this case? haha

Niklas - Jul 26, 2015 at 17:56

How do you handle your builds? I'm currently reading up some on Continous Integration and I became interested when you were talking about passing along the current build amongst eachother.
I just setup a Jenkins build server for my own projects that automatically build & upload to a shared dropbox folder and I found that it's a huge time saver. So my question is basically - what are your thoughts about CI/continous game builds and how do you solve it?

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Jul 26, 2015 at 18:08

I don't use CI, but will when the game goes into test. It's just not worth it this early in the project. I don't make builds for David, since he's doing game programming, it just builds himself. One problem with CI is that I don't have a Windows machine, I run a VM on my Mac and for CI to work well, you need an always on dedicated machine.

But I do automate my build process, so to make Gary or Mark a build, I just type one command on the command line and it does everything, including uploading it to the server. I'm a huge fan of very few (fuck-up-able) steps.

Niklas - Jul 26, 2015 at 18:14

Great, thanks for answering :)

Estranged2 - Jul 26, 2015 at 20:57

Boring? This podcast is the highlight of my day. After that it's "back to the salt mines" as Ron has once said.