GBGamesLike most people, I’m excited about Will Wright’s Spore, but Joystiq reported that Michael Chang created Manifest which allows users to create new creatures that make use of procedural animation and movement. Pretty sweet, especially for a three week project.
I mentioned previously that I was going to help a friend with his mobile game development company, and so I finally got around to learning how to work with J2ME.
I’m reading J2ME Game Programming by Martin J. Wells. I don’t much care for his randomly inserted jokes, and it is fairly obvious that the book is geared towards Windows. At one point I thought that Sun didn’t offer a MIDP1.x package for Linux-based systems, but I finally found it. I really didn’t want to be forced to use Windows every time I worked games in general, let alone mobile games.
It didn’t take me long to get things going, as you can see:
/me finally gets to check off an entry in his TODO list.
It’s been in the news for some time, but it is still very cool news: Quake 3: Arena Source GPL’d
id has been pretty good about releasing the source to their older game engines. It’s not a new idea for the company. Apparently you still have people who think that the GPL is about stealing someone’s work, as this comment shows:
A Shame
Why did not you buy this game ?Quake 3 is a great game, it costs few bucks
You want games for free, so I ask you to work freely, without salary.
Give your goods for free if you ask the games for free !
Huh?!? id released the source code to their engine under the General Public License. The game data and scripts remain proprietary, so you can’t legally play the GAME unless you pay for the proprietary data . It isn’t like some GPL zealots hacked into their servers and placed the code under the GPL. It isn’t like Carmack will come out with a statement like, “It is with great regret that I must inform everyone that we’ve lost our source code to the scourge of the GPL; however, we will not give up. We will fight back, and we will win!” It was a conscious decision to release the source, and no one is under the delusion that it is a free lunch except for people who think that the GPL equates to legalized piracy.
The Complete Text of General Public License
The GPL covers whatever an author wants to cover. Some games, source code and data, are covered under the GPL entirely, but the terms are restricted to the engine’s source code in this case. Therefore, the GPL dictates the terms of copying, modifying, and distributing the Quake 3 Arena source code. Not how you actually use the program. Not what you can do to the art or music that comes with the game. Copyright law gives id exclusive rights to the Quake 3 Arena engine source code. If they want to allow people to read the code, change the code, compile the code, redistribute the code, etc, they have the right to do so. The GPL is simply one of a number of standard documents to express what rights they are allowing others to have.
Don’t worry. No one is ripping id off.
I don’t play WoW, but I thought this thread on their forums was hilarious: Son owned by Mother
A friend sent me this link last week: Guess the Google!
It is a fun game in which you only have a few seconds to try to guess the Google search term that resulted in the 20 images displayed. Requires Flash 7 to play.
Whoops! I didn’t meant to stay up past midnight programming!
I think it is a good thing that I was getting so into it that I didn’t notice when an hour or two went by. At least, that’s what makes me feel better about how behind my project is. In this time, I managed to get the program window to come up and close on the correct input without seg faulting for the first time.
I was still having fun, as frustrating as it was. I distinctly remember not feeling motivated when I started this programming session, but here I am, hours later. Good night!
While I think KDE and Gnome are great, I’ve grown accustomed to Fluxbox. It’s a lightweight window manager and does all I need it to do. One day I plan to use FVWM because it is so configurable, but Fluxbox is great for now.
I also use Debian. Debian has added a common menu for each desktop environment and window manager. While it is normally very nice, it doesn’t please everyone all the time, and there is one thing I can specifically complain about:
Now, xsetroot is a command line tool. It is, according to the man page, a “root window parameter setting utility for X”. Normally people use it to set the background to an image. KDE and Gnome and other window managers have simple, GUI-based ways to let you do so, but for people who prefer config files and scripts, xsetroot is the command you use. Of course, it needs arguments to be useful.
So what happens when you run xsetroot without any parameters? It resets your background and your mouse cursor to the default X settings. Essentially, it means your mouse is now a cross instead of an arrow and your background is made up of an annoying-to-the-eye pattern. So when you click on that menu entry, you end up with an ugly background and mouse cursor. Why would they put that entry in there?!
Luckily, Fluxbox lets you change the style from the main menu, so the background could revert back to what I had before, but the mouse cursor stayed the same. I didn’t want to have to restart the X server just to get a good mouse cursor back, so I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to change it manually.
After some IRC inqueries, man page requests, and some Googling, I found Customizing X Windows Tips. At one point, it mentions the various standard mouse cursors you can use. The command to use is xsetroot -cursor_name <cursorname> where cursorname can be one of entries in /usr/X11R6/include/X11/cursorfont.h
Some examples:
Well, now that I know about it, it is pretty easy, but it isn’t very obvious to someone who doesn’t know. KDE and Gnome users are probably laughing at me as their mouse cursors are handled by the desktop environment, and Windows and Mac users might be thinking that using Gnu/Linux is tougher than it really is, but hey, I now know something that I didn’t know before. My computer is that much less mysterious. Some people might prefer to just get things done without knowing how the computer works, but I am a curious person. Before, I was always afraid of accidentally running xsetroot from the menu and not being able to recover. Now, I can feel comfort knowing that if something does go wrong, I can fix it, and I also know a lot more about the issue to make things better for me if I want. I am planning on writing a GUI to pick a mouse cursor for people who might not want to know about how things work and so don’t care to figure out how to fix it. I imagine that one might already exist for X11, but I haven’t seen it yet.
The Escapist’s Casual Friday for issue #4 featured the article Machinima by JR Sutich. It started out alright. It talked about how cool some video game movies, like Red vs Blue, can be. It also talks about how much poor quality work is out there that passes as Machinima but is really nothing more than some kid trying to show off how skillful he is at a game.
Sutich talks about how the issue of copyright infringement hasn’t come up very often for these videos. If not for the games themselves, why not for the popular music that gets featured? Especially since MTV has decided to play machinima music videos, it would make sense that the RIAA might decide that unauthorized machinima should be stopped to protect “creative artists”.
And then Sutich says that it would be a good development! While I understand the idea that there is copyrighted work that should be protected and I understand that strict enforcement of copyright would get rid of a lot of the crap out there, I also think that if the only people who can make machinima are the people who are given approval by the game companies, it would stifle creativity rather than promote it. He says, “often the best way to get something legitimized is to have it come under such intense scrutiny that it becomes regulated.” So now machinima isn’t legitimate? Microsoft has embraced Red vs Blue, and EA clearly must approve of Rooster Teeth’s Sims 2-based series The Strangerhood.
People make some pretty good quality machinima out there. It isn’t always easy to find, but it is one of those things that makes the Internet so cool. If people become afraid to make it for fear of copyright infringement lawsuits, there will only be that many less people making it. Maybe the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations would prefer it to be as controlled as possible, but I know I don’t.
I love the Zelda series, like most people. I even liked Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, but it could be because I bought the game with my own money back when I was too young to get a job.
So when I played Wind Waker for the Gamecube, I was a bit put off. After all, I liked Ocarina of Time and expected that the Gamecube version would be very similar. And I’m not complaining about the graphics like a lot of people did when it was first revealed. In fact, I think they look great.
I’m complaining because things aren’t as obvious as I think they should be. Now, I’ve played the original, The Legend of Zelda for the NES, and I remember being confused as to where I was expected to go. I only knew about things because friends of mine had already been there. I played a significant portion of the game on my own, but the experience was kind of ruined for me. And the game never told you where to go really (or if it did, I was too young to understand it), so it was entirely possible to discover the entrance to Level 4 before finding Level 2. But I played through A Link to the Past for the SNES and Link’s Awakening for Game Boy and loved them. Ocarina of Time for the N64 was also an incredibly great experience for me. Everything flowed in these games. I never felt like something was missing or that I was fighting against the game’s programming.
So what happened with Wind Waker? Don’t get me wrong. I think it is fun to play…most of the time. Fighting is incredibly fun, and the puzzles are a staple in Zelda games. But as I go through the game, I periodically find parts of the game that do not seem well done or polished up.
For instance, after you manage to destroy the boulder and allow the spring to flow, you can swim across to the other side. What you see is the entrance to a cavern, but there is lava preventing you from going inside. I see that there are some Bomb Flowers, so I think that maybe I have to throw them at the statues. So I tried. I threw the bombs at the statues. I threw them into the walls. I threw them into the lava. I tried to throw them across the lava. Nothing. And after some time, I decided to give up and stop playing that day.
When I came back to it, I still struggled. Then I threw a bomb at a statue, and apparently it hit it just right, because then it fell over! I later found out that you were supposed to hit the bomb on top of the pot it is holding, but I had thrown it there before, or so I had thought. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Flower Bombs (losing hearts because you didn’t stand far enough away is proof), and yet these statues needed precision hits?
There were other inconsistencies and frustrations that I can’t remember at the moment, but the point is that I kept feeling like Wind Waker was not developed with the same care as previous games in the series. While some parts of it were really well done, other parts were sources of confusion and frustration. I still don’t understand the Flower Bomb precision thing.
And then I find that Shigeru Miyamoto admits it. Later parts of the game were being made while working against the clock, with features being approved without enthusiasm. I am kind of shocked because I would think that you would give a person such as Miyamoto as much time as he feels necessary to make the game great.
I still like Wind Waker, but it is pretty sad to find out that the game was made in a way that didn’t even please the creator.
A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if I had heard about The Escapist, the new weekly magazine about video games and gaming culture. I hadn’t, even though it was covered at some blogs and gaming news sites…and Slashdot, the productivity killer which I’ve successfully been able to avoid for some time. Apparently this magazine is not just a new competitor for PC Gamer or Electronic Gaming Monthly. From the first issue’s letter from the editor:
The Escapist is an ambitious magazine, written, edited and styled with a fresh approach to communicating with gamers. We are the complement to the current gaming journalistic efforts. While the others give you up-to-the-second news coverage, we give you broad looks at news over time, discussing trends and proffering glimpses into the future. While the others provide previews and reviews of the next big thing, we give you a taste of the Cinderella game that might just steal the spotlight, plus a look at why. And while others ask developers about their latest projects, we delve into the masterminds’ thoughts and histories to find out what makes them tick.
So it is meant to be a magazine for mature gamers who don’t want hype and juvenile humor to litter their gaming literature. It’s for people who want to read about game culture instead of just news on the latest titles.
First impressions: I like it.
The magazine is free online (there are syndication feeds available), and there is a high quality PDF version to let you print out the magazine yourself if you choose to do so. I think I would like to actually order a subscription through the mail, but they don’t seem to offer that option yet. Also, their website apparently doesn’t work too great with Firefox if you increase the font size, and IE doesn’t let you change it at all. They hard coded the text to match the images, so the small font size isn’t fun to read, and increasing it makes it difficult since it will cover or get covered by other elements on the page. They tried to copy the print magazine (which doesn’t really exist!) look and feel onto their website, and that just doesn’t work well. Luckily, XFree86 (I use Debian so I don’t have X.org yet) lets me zoom in on the screen, but it is a silly thing to require this workaround.
Still, the content is good. I may not agree with the opinion of everyone who writes for it. For example, I don’t think “gamer” refers only to people who play games exclusive to everything else, and I don’t think that definition is as commonly understood to be the case, as claimed by one author. I also don’t think that games should be considered “crack-like” and “addictive”, as the article on Greg Gorden described them. But it is refreshing to read an entire magazine that discusses the topics in a mature manner that I’ve generally found exclusive to blogs.
It’s also quite informative, as Max Steele’s article on mobile gaming in the 2nd issue shows. Being American and fairly isolated from international news in general, I didn’t know that the N-Gage had sold so well in the rest of the world, but Steele’s article touched on that platform while talking about the upcoming Mobile Platform Wars between Sony, Nintendo, and Nokia. Until then, I didn’t even know Nokia was involved! And the article also described who each company is targeting. I don’t know if Nintendo will end up the clear winner and I don’t know if I agree that Sony’s system will be disgarded as just more-of-the-same-but-smaller. I also don’t know if anyone likes reading an author talk about himself in the third person. But it was definitely a high quality article that made good arguments. A different article in the same issue focused on that video feature for the PSP while another complained about the loooooong load times for it, so there was plenty of depth and breadth to the magazine.
The Escapist is definitely staying in my RSS feeds, although I wish that the website version wouldn’t be so badly “ported” from the PDF. At the very least make the text larger. Ideally, the web version should be made for the web.