Categories
Games Geek / Technical

YASD, the First for 2008

I was a tourist, exploring the dungeon with my yet-unnamed feline companion, when I found a ring. I put it on, and it turned out to be a ring of invisibility! How awesome is that!

I managed to get fairly far at a low experience level because enemies just couldn’t find me until I already hit them with my +2 darts or kicked them. I was sitting in a room after making it to a new level of the dungeon, inspecting my inventory, when a friend came over to my computer.

“What’s this?”
“Oh, this is NetHack. My cat keeps getting in my way.”
“Uh, huh…wait, what?”
“Here, let me show you. Oh…wait. Let me take off my ring of invisibility first.”

I took a moment to look through the help to figure out how to take off a ring. I’ve never survived long enough to want to take one off before!

“Ok, so this at sign here? That’s me.”
“Uh…”
“And that f? That’s my cat. These are the walls, this is the floor, and this is the door out of the room.”
“Where are your enemies?”
“Probably on the other side of this door.”

I opened the door, walked down the dark corridor, and made it into a room with a fountain. Just as I was about to describe that I was near a fountain, an iguana appeared in the doorway. I showed my friend the text that appeared at the top as the battle waged between the iguana and my cat. My cat was victorious.

“Uh, huh. Well, I’m going to go back to my world where things are tangible. Like, with graphics.” I joked that the graphics came from my imagination, and I pushed my glasses up my nose.

I continued to play. I decided to drink from the fountain…and water moccasins streamed out! There were three giant “S” characters looming before me on the screen. They were between me and the doorway out of the room.

And I was still not wearing my ring of invisibility!

I put the ring on, but not before they took a few bites out of me. I tried to move out of the way, and they started swiping at the air. Phew!

But then I walked forward, and they apparently got lucky and hit me five times before I could move. I was poisoned, but it didn’t matter since I was killed by one last bite.

Ah, NetHack.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

SimCity Source Is Now Under the GPL!

Found through TIGSource, which found it through Fear and Loathing:

This is the binary and source code for Micropolis (A.K.A. “S*mC*ty”: see the GPL License and additional terms, below), which is released under the GPL.

The One Laptop Per Child laptop is going to have an official and original SimCity game available for it. Don Hopkins has cleaned up the code and removed references to the SimCity trademark. Now the source to the original SimCity is available for everyone to study, play with, and change!

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some “creative” programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it’s just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it’s content sure is interesting to see.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Merry Christmas!

On Christmas Eve each year, my parents host a dinner at their house. Being an Italian household, there is an abundance of seafood and pasta. After dinner, the men will usually play poker, the women will talk, and the children will either watch television or play video games.

I brought my Gamecube. I’m not as big a fan of poker. B-)

Also, each year there is an unspoken contest between me and my sister. We each have a stocking up, and each year I put a walnut in her stocking. Occasionally I’ll find it back in my stocking, and we try to avoid being the one with the walnut on Christmas Day. I just checked, and I’m still winning. Another aspect of the game is that since it is never announced, it’s always part of the fun to see if I can make it to Christmas without her even being aware that the game has started.

Christmas 2007 - The Walnut

Merry Christmas!

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Politics/Government

Steam: Further Impressions

I hate Half-life 2.

I hate it because one night I found that I was still playing the game at 3AM, and I was supposed to be waking up in only a few hours to get ready for work. When you have to worry about using the words “tonight” or “today” to describe “now”, you stop worrying about finding a good place to stop (there isn’t one. It’s like a well-written novel that way).

I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on playing this game for so long. I’ve played Quake 4‘s single-player campaign a bit, but it isn’t the same feeling. In Nova Prospekt and City 14, I feel like I’m dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. There’s hope hidden everywhere, and it feels like a idealistic fight. In Quake 4, I had one exciting fight against a giant mechanical insect, and later encountered a similar one while crawling under some tunnels. I remember being afraid as I crawled past it, thinking that at any moment the glass will break and it would be right on top of me. Still, the conversations and emotions didn’t feel real. I felt like I was playing a game. Half-life 2 is a really great game. Well, it’s not as if most of you didn’t already know.

And you know what else I like? That I don’t have to worry about finding my CD when I want to play the game. Unless I want to resort to using cracks, I still need a CD to play Starcraft or any number of games.

One of the things I remember worrying about with Steam was the problem of losing a network connection. When it was first launched, customers found that the network was overloaded and so they couldn’t play the game they already paid for. Well, that sucks for the people who ordered the game through Steam and couldn’t download or update it, but what about the smart people who bought the game at the store? No, they couldn’t play either because Valve decided that the store-bought version needed to be authenticated as well. I had sent an email asking about this, and after three replies in which I didn’t feel I received a satisfactory answer, I was told someone would get back to me and no one did.

So let’s do a test. I’ll disconnect my network connection and try to start Half-life 2. I get a dialog box that says Steam couldn’t connect, but I was able to start it in off-line mode. Nice. Half-life 2 loads up, but when I try to play, it crashes. Huh. Well, wait. Last time I played, I was in the middle of a firefight in “Anticitizen One”, and the game crashed to the desktop. If I use a save game from a few minutes earlier, the game loads fine, and my squad mates are yelling about the man in the mask who is shooting us from the street.

And now it’s 30 minutes later. Oh, yeah. I was running a test. I wasn’t supposed to keep playing.

Also, last night I received an automatic update for the Steam client. Oh. I, uh, didn’t know you were even downloading anything. What if I didn’t want the update? As mentioned years ago on Valve, Steam and DRM:

Steam pushes new versions whether you want them or not. Sure, you can decline to update, but you won’t be playing anytime soon. While this may look good on the surface solving incompatibility between revisions, the reality is much harsher.

The author mentioned Counter-strike 2 and the bots that were being developed for it. He loved them. Then an update came out that removed the bots completely.

Normally, you just don’t update and keep playing like you always did. Now, you don’t have a choice. Your entire gameplay experience is in the hands of some programmer. Whether you thought their previous effort was better is irrelevant. Whether you like an old feature or weapon is no longer your concern. Welcome to the DRM age.

As you can see, the DRM world isn’t as rosy as the pro-DRM lobby make it out to be. Technical glitches and decisions made by the copyright holders are turning the simple act of buying a game, installing it and running it into a minefield of checks, any of which can stop you from playing your rightfully purchased game or software should they fail.

Well, so far I haven’t had anything that I didn’t want changed, but the idea that the creator of the software I’m using still has control over what I can do with it after I’ve installed it makes me uncomfortable. Because of these concerns, I would still prefer to play games natively on my Gnu/Linux systems. For the most part, I can trust those computers better. It just makes me sad that I feel like I have to choose between really good games and really trustworthy games.

Also, I haven’t looked into this, but if I plan on purchasing The Orange Box, and I do so through a retail shop so I have a physical product in my hands, is there still a complicated activation process through Steam, or do the games play out of the box without requiring a network connection? I remember Half-life 2 needing some kind of decryption process for the game data that could take hours, although downloading the game in my experience didn’t seem to need extra time after I got it. Also, if I buy a physical product, will it require a CD in the drive to play, or does it associate the game with my Steam account and let me have the convenience that I’ve grown accustomed to?

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Personal Development

Catching Up On Life

Since moving into my current apartment in August, I’ve let things get a bit out of control in my life. My last Thousander Club post was in September. My inbox has been looking like a huge chore to get through. My blog comments were an even worse chore, but I hope I fixed that problem (more later). November is National Novel Writing Month, and I had entered NaNoWriMo, only to write a little over 2,000 words out of the goal of 50,000. It’s not that I haven’t had the time. With not working on Killer Kittens or writing blog posts, I had plenty of time. Without going into details, things in my life have been fairly hectic these past couple of months. Frankly, my business, blog, and side projects like novel-writing had to be put on the back burner. That I managed to finish reading a book throughout all of this is an accomplishment.

But I’m finally getting back on track. I’m remembering how to write lists to focus my actions. I’m itching to work on Killer Kittens again. I want to write about games and their development again. But first, I need to work on my backlog of tasks I’ve been neglecting.

I finally reduced my email inbox at the day job to 0, and I have been maintaining it for the past couple of days easily. I still need to tackle my GBGames email. I just installed Akismet, and I should have done so a long time ago. Today I deleted another few hundred spam comments, and a couple of days ago I had over 1,000 spam comments. I didn’t even bother going through it to see if a legit message was in there, so if you had posted a comment that didn’t automatically get posted for being a loyal commenter, you may need to repost.

My physical inbox at home is still a pile of mail, notes, and papers, but at least I finally entered all of the receipts on my desk into GnuCash. My bills are paid. All the urgent and important things are taken care of on this front. I can tackle the rest either all at once or in chunks.

I need to renew my domain names, renew my just lapsed membership to the IGDA, and renew my ASP membership.

And all the while, I need to remember to make lists of Next Actions and Projects.

Oh, and I want a TV. Nothing sucks more than having six different consoles of as many generations without a television to connect them to. Still, I have a computer and a decent network connection, so while I can’t watch Heroes, Chuck, and Pushing Daisies, I can watch Irving Renquist, Ghost Hunter and random cats and elite Starcraft matches on YouTube. Wait, I can watch Heroes and Chuck online, but it’s just not the same.

Anyway, I’m hoping to get back into regularly updating my blog. I might not have a post each day, but hopefully I will have something interesting to contribute more often than not. Tonight I think I will update the books I’ve read and games I’ve played list. Quake 4 is actually fun, by the way.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

The Return of Spam

I’ve been getting a lot more spam comments on this blog. It’s frustrating enough that I haven’t been dedicating the time to writing new posts, but the time I do dedicate to my blog has been spent deleting hundreds of messages at a time.

I’ve found some interesting spam messages. Today I learned about someone supposedly trying to propose to his girlfriend by having everyone forward his proposal. The idea is that it will eventually get forwarded to his girlfriend. Cute.

Otherwise, I get spam about drugs, mortgages, and porn. Oh, and the spam that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than to give the McLeod Brothers material for their Spamland videos.

I sometimes wonder if I couldn’t do a better job of spamming people. There has to be a better way to get past spam filters than making your message so diluted that no one knows why you’re trying to contact them. Yeah, spamming is easier than actually doing the work to cultivate a relationship with your customers, but how fulfilling can it possibly be?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

The Internet: I Has It

Yesterday the cable was finally setup in my apartment. Since they don’t support Gnu/Linux, and the tech couldn’t figure out why my laptop thought it didn’t have an Ethernet port, he had to set it up on my girlfriend’s PC.

I had to talk to them on the phone since I was at work when they were there. “Which computer is it?” It’s the only Windows PC outside of the office. “You’ll need to be a bit more descriptive than that. Is it the small one?” I’m pretty sure my girlfriend will know which computer is hers. Also, both computers outside of the office are small ones.

Don’t even get me started on the frustration I had earlier from explaining to them that my laptop runs Ubuntu by default and they would need to switch to Windows when the menu appears at startup.

Why they need to install any kind of software in order to register the IP address, I don’t know. This morning I was able to unplug the modem (which kept blinking its lights…creepy), plug it into my router in my office, bring up my desktop, and immediately my browser showed me my homepage. I thought I was going to have to change some settings on my router, but apparently not. They can’t just carry a device that automatically registers whatever they need? Why does my computer need any third-party software to run a network connection?

I am currently on hold waiting for tech support to help me figure out why I can’t send email using their SMTP server. So far I have had to get through the “We don’t support anything but our own email” line after explaining that I don’t need them to do anything but support the outgoing mail like they obviously do.

Anyway, I am currently downloading over 6000 email messages from GBGames.com. I imagine most of it is spam.

I’ll need to setup some kind of dynamic DNS system in order to be able to SSH into my machine from outside the home. Comcast doesn’t offer static IP addresses to commercial customers, and I’m not paying as much as they want for a business line. Even if I was willing to spend that much, I wouldn’t want to give them that kind of business. I’m was not happy with how long it took to get service in the first place, and then it took three visits over the course of almost a month before I was able to sit at my own computer and update my blog from here.

I still need to setup the rest of the network, especially since my girlfriend’s PC now needs a wireless connection in order to connect from the other room. It’s kind of nice having my own office, though. My window has a nice view over a park, and I can see the sky. It makes up for the gloom of having a corner cube at the day job. B-)

EDIT: After being on hold with Comcast for way too long to get no useful information, I finally found this webpage with the following useful info:

If you get a error message that the SMTP server may be unavailable or refusing SMTP connections there is a undocumented configuration that several users have gotten to work. Use port 465 , set “use secure connection” to SSL, check the authentication required box and provide your full Comcast address as the username.

I can now count myself among those who had to use this undocumented configuration. It’s not even the end of the first day, and I am already frustrated with Comcast. Bartender! More orange juice! Make it a double, and keep ’em coming. I’ll be here for awhile.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

My Moving Giveaway

Yesterday I signed a lease and will be moving into my new apartment at the end of the week. I have some hardware that has been collecting dust, and so I figure it is time to give them to someone who can provide a good home.

– HP Deskjet 612c
– HP Deskjet 840c
– Micron CRT monitor (Model RM07R11) (has a visible line running down
the front, but otherwise works well) (also, I obtained it from CTI when
they were getting rid of it. It still has the CTI barcode on the top.
You can carry the torch!)
– 2 x AVerTV Go 007 FM Plus video capture cards. One of them worked
flawlessly in my MythTV box, the other seemingly didn’t. I presume it
likely works fine in Windows, though. Both are not hardware-accelerated
capture cards, and so I replaced them.
– One of those Hauppauge Windows Media Remote controls

I also have an old PC that was getting finicky towards the end of its
usage. The finicky part of the machine could have been the hard drive,
or it could have been the mobo itself. It was too much work to figure
out and new computers were cheap, so I ended up replacing it. The
following parts are probably worth more than the whole.

You can probably still make use of the processor. The mobo is an Abit
BE6-II. The processor is an Intel Celeron (or at least that is what I
can read below the fan on the processor itself. I can’t find out what
speed it is, but I do recall it being overclocked to 800MHz.

1 x 128MB SDRAM 133Mhz memory stick
The power supply and case
An ethernet card
Possibly a Soundblaster Live! sound card (if not, a regular sound card
with multiple inputs)
Nvidia Vanta 16MB video card? I’m not actually sure, but I think that
is what I see. My first video card. It has served me well in the past.

There is a CDROM drive in the machine as well, but it doesn’t say what
speed it is on the front.

I sent the above to the mailing list of the DePaul Linux Community. Separate from it, you get a special treat! I have a few old Sega Genesis-related materials! Since I do not own a Sega Genesis, they aren’t doing me any good, so maybe you would love to own the following:

Empty case: Centurion: Defender of Rome
Instructions in case: Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Super Monaco GP
Game in case: Star Control, NHL 94, NFL Football 94
Games and Instructions in case: LHX Attack Chopper, Joe Montana 2: Sports Talk Football, Hard Ball 3, Super Hydlide, Flashback (has strategy guide instead of instruction book), NHL Hockey, RBI Baseball 93, Bill Walsh College Football 95

I also have a Game Genie Manual and Codebook…but no Game Genie.

If you are interested, feel free to email me or leave a comment. I’d prefer not to ship it, so if you could pick it up yourself here in Chicago (obviously easier for some people than for others), you can get it for free.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business Politics/Government

So-Called DRM is Fundamentally Flawed

PlayNoEvil Game Security News and Analysis wrote an interesting post regarding DRM as a broken system. Microsoft’s Digital Restrictions Management for Windows has been defeated. Again. Nothing too newsworthy about it.

What’s interesting is the following statement:

In fact, as I’ve noted before (repeatedly), DRM is built on a flawed model.

Traditional cryptographic security systems are designed to heal themselves to protect new data. This is completely inconsistent with the underlying model that content protection is built on – the protection of existing data.

This article isn’t bashing Microsoft specifically. It’s pointing out the flaws in a system that is not well designed to do what it is supposed to do. Food for thought if you are one of those people who still believe that copy protection is a “vital” part of game development. If DRM isn’t actually doing a good job of preventing copyright infringement, and it frustrates your paying customers, why use it?

It seems that using regular copy protection techniques will be much more effective than anything that resembles DRM.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

Learning Random Things

I sometimes find potentially useful video game knowledge in the strangest places. After reading Joel Spolsky’s post on the difference between Microsoft’s implementation of font rendering and Apple’s implementation, I followed the link to Texts Rasterization Exposures which goes into great detail on the topic.

The article is about font rendering. What does it have to do with games?

Maybe nothing too much, but I already learned one thing I didn’t already know.

The visual response is approximately proportional to the square root of the physical luminosity. In other words, if there are two white pixels on black, and one of them emits exactly two times more photons per second, it won’t look two times brighter. It will be about 1.4 times brighter.

The accompanying picture shows two white dots on a black background. In order to make something look two times brighter, you would need to add more than two times as many pixels. 4 pixels == 2x as bright as 1 pixel.

The article discusses anti-aliasing techniques, gamma correction, and the problems of font rendering on a Linux-based system. Still, I now know how to make lights appear brighter as well as why it works. If I need a lighthouse to rotate, or a car to turn a corner towards the camera, I have a better idea about what I need to accomplish the effect.

Sometimes I wonder about people who don’t expose themselves to multiple ideas. I occasionally like to read about the history of a place or an idea. I enjoy researching many different topics. Once again, I am glad that my university didn’t have a game development degree available when I started. I would have cut myself off from a lot of information if I had focused so much of my efforts on a degree in a specific field.

Will Wright came up with Spore while thinking about astronomy and education. Shigeru Miyamoto created the universe of Zelda after exploring the fields of Kyoto. What can you create if you only know about existing video games? I think that exposing yourself to multiple thoughts and a wide variety of topics can only help to spur creativity. People invent life-changing things and ideas by finding connections between one field and another. Velcro is a famous example.

Have you ever come across a random piece of information in a seemingly irrelevant piece of text? Has a talk on economics inspired your FPS?