Friday, October 10, 2003

Okay. I know, I know. I haven’t posted anything in days. It’s just that…well, I got a call on my wristphone Tuesday about another deadly attack by the Hammerheads on planet Cardonia, so I had to blast off in my starfighter and patrol the area for a couple of days. And the nearest space station only had dial-up.

I have been working nights on a possible Otherspace Productions animation: a short anime parody in which lain of serial experiments lain goes up against Agent Smith of The Matrix.

I’ve scripted out the animation, and have been drawing the storyboard. It’s quite a bit of work, really; the storyboard will end up with about fifteen drawings, of which I’ve drawn twelve this week. Many of them are fairly detailed, too (I just can’t resist adding nice detail). Once I’m done, I’ll upload it and will point to it from here.

Meanwhile, I stumbled across something quite fascinating.

There’s a new technology out there set to prevent software piracy in computer games. It’s called “Fade.” Two parts of this are interesting: how it works, and what it does.

It works by taking advantage of disc-burning tools. The original contains intentional “scratches” in the disc, which the game looks for when booting up. If the scratches are there, the game plays normally. But disc-burning software automatically removes scratches, so that an unauthorized copy will be relatively scratch-free. In this case, the game will know it’s been pirated.

But the game doesn’t shut down if it’s been pirated. Instead, it slowly degrades the play experience. In a shooter, for example, the player’s aim will get increasingly erratic over time.

I can’t think of any obvious disadvantages to this.