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About

About

It would be fair to say that technology has always run through my interests. I once owned the ZX spectrum with something that looked like an early mobile phone that plugged into a card slot at the back to ramp it up to 16K. That was then followed by a Atari St, Amiga600, and then PC for ever.

When I look back on 30 years of playing with computers at first through games, and then to acutally use them as part of my work, I do think somewhere along the way we passed a point where it became no longer necessary for programmers to think creatively because there was always more space or a few extra lines of unrefined programming code that could just be used instead.

Compare how programmes tackled the task of creating universes found in the game of Elite on the BBC Micro.

“The Elite universe contains eight galaxies, each galaxy containing 256 planets to explore. Due to the limited capabilities of 8-bit computers, these worlds are procedurally generated. A single seed number is run through a fixed algorithm the appropriate number of times and creates a sequence of numbers determining each planet’s complete composition (position in the galaxy, prices of commodities, and even name and local details— text strings are chosen numerically from a lookup table and assembled to produce unique descriptions for each planet). This means that no extra memory is needed to store the characteristics of each planet, yet each is unique and has fixed properties. Each galaxy is also procedurally generated from the first.”

Nowadays it appears to me that games makers have less limitations in this regard. But it is also interesting that the games world rarely delivers a masterpiece, but is instead content to roll out reskins of formats that have been flogged for eternity.

Sorry, I got a bit caught up there….Welcome to a dojo of sorts but also a place where I gaze into the world of online marketing and peg a few things of note. 

I have been online marketing since 1999, but at the rate it changes my hunches are more of a Columbo style hunch.

Enjoy the read.

Glyn.

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