Category: Geek / Technical

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?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Upgrading from Ubuntu Edgy to Ubuntu Feisty

As I mentioned before, I tried to upgrade my laptop from Edgy to Feisty. I had read about upgrades from Dapper to Edgy being a problem, but I also read that upgrading to Feisty shouldn’t be.

I was wrong. After the upgrade, I couldn’t boot into Ubuntu. I would instead see the following:

Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/38ede6ac-6b2f-44d7-a635-deab88ae9381 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

I had to switch to the earliest kernel I had out of the four or five available before I could boot, and even then it was without a GUI. At least I could edit config files, and with network access, I could check in the changes I made to my project.

After trying a number of solutions I found online, I decided that I didn’t have time for figuring it out and will simply install Feisty over the existing borked-up install. I know Feisty will work on my Dell Precision M90…it’s the same machine that Michael Dell uses Feisty on!

I downloaded a Feisty install ISO, burned it to a CD, and popped it into the laptop. When I ran the install, it asked me about partitions. I told it to leave my /home partition alone. I had backed up the important things on there just in case. It formatted the other partitions (I only had /, swap, and /home), installed, and before I knew it, I had the familiar Ubuntu desktop in front of me.

Why the upgrade didn’t work for me, I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong, and it turned out to be easier to just do a fresh install. The downside to doing so is that I need to redownload any applications and tools I had, such as multimedia codecs, Zim, g++, and autotools. Beryl doesn’t work quite right, but I’m sure I missed something when I set it up. The eye-candy is only useful for showing off at events anyway, so it can wait. B-)

Now that I have it installed, I’m taking it through its paces. Hardware accelerated video is working well, and I haven’t encountered any hardware that isn’t working, so at least there were no regressions there. Wait…Ok, I just checked, and my USB mouse was automatically detected. I had read that people had issues with USB in Feisty, so at least I’m fine. I found that it is mounting my Windows partition, too, which can be useful if I have to access data on that side.

I’m a bit disappointed that the upgrade didn’t work cleanly, and I’m worried about the reports that Feisty is a buggy regression from Edgy. Still, after the install, I’m back to working with my laptop.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

Excited about PS3 Price Drop?

I received an email from EBGames.com informing me that the PS3 dropped in price.

Let’s get right to it, lowered in price $100 the Sony 60GB PS3 is now available for $499! Armed with the Blue-ray Disc player, built-in HDD, 1080p high-def output, Wi-Fi connectivity and SIXAXIS wireless controller, what else could you possibly want from a serious gaming system?

I replied to myself with “How about games?”

While I admit that I haven’t been following the games available for any of the latest generation consoles and so don’t know much about games available for the PS3, I find the next line pretty telling:

On top of that, from now until September 30, purchase a PS3 and receive 5 free Blu-ray movies with mail-in redemption.

Uh, this “serious gaming system” should let me play games still, right? When Sony first announced the PS3, I remember thinking that the fanboys have their work cut out for them. No games announced. It was just a very powerful computer system. Oh, and it played movies in a format that no one has.

Today, are there any games for PS3 that merit buying a PS3? Even with the “price drop”? Is anyone really that excited about being able to purchase a PS3 at what I still consider too high a price for a video game console? The Wii has some interesting games, although as I understand it there seems to be a lack of interesting new games coming in the near future. The 360 has XBLA. What does the PS3 have going for it? What games can I get with the $100 savings? Or am I supposed to be happy with buying more Blu-ray movies…which I already own on DVD and can watch on my laptop or using the television-connected DVD player? It’s not even perfectly backwards compatible with the PS2, so why not purchase that system instead? There are hundreds of games available for it.

Last week, I was having a blast playing the SNES game Smash TV with my girlfriend’s nephew…on my old SNES. I don’t feel like I am missing out on the next gen experience. Anyone else?

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

World of What?

This past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to a barbecue. One of her cousins was on the computer, so I went in to say hello.

“What are you doing?”
“Playing Runescape.”
“Oh, I remember when I played that game. It looks much better than I remember it.”
“Yeah, I’m at max level for wood cutting.”
“Did you know that there are more people playing Runescape than World of Warcraft?”
“What’s World of Warcraft?”

Oh, yeah. There are people who haven’t heard of one of of the biggest names in video games.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, last I checked, Runescape had one million more people playing it than World of Warcraft did. You’ll note that when people talk about WoW‘s size, they can never call it the largest. They always talk about revenue. WoW makes much more money than Runescape, but Runescape has more people playing.

And apparently some of them have never heard of World of Warcraft. This map of online communities is slightly inaccurate in the same way that Alaska always looks smaller than it really is on a world map.

Anyway, I think it is interesting when you can’t depend on people knowing who you are, no matter how big of a gorilla you are. Before Runescape, he was playing on Club Penguin. Maybe one day he’ll discover games such as World of Warcraft and Vendetta Online, but for now, he has no idea that you even exist.

Categories
Geek / Technical General Linux Game Development Marketing/Business Politics/Government

GPL v3 Released

The Free Software Foundation launched GPLv3 yesterday. You can read the wording of the license in its final form.

What does it mean for software developers and indie developers in particular? I don’t know. The GPLv2 was written over a decade ago, and this new version deals with software in the face of new technologies such as the World Wide Web. I know a number of businesses participated in the discussions so any silly arguments about the license being a tool for communism can hopefully be put to rest.

“By hearing from so many different groups in a public drafting process, we have been able to write a license that successfully addresses a broad spectrum of concerns. But even more importantly, these different groups have had an opportunity to find common ground on important issues facing the free software community today, such as patents, tivoization, and Treacherous Computing,” said the Foundation’s executive director, Peter Brown.

I am sure people will be talking about what the new license means and how it is different from GPLv2 for weeks to come.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

A Brief History of Linux Gaming

Thanks to LinuxGames.com, I learned about the blog kahvipapu and the Linux Gaming series of posts.

In part one, the author focuses on first-person shooters. Loki ported quite a few games from Windows, including Quake 3 Arena. I was able to purchase multiple copies in the distinctive metal packaging once Loki went out of the business. Besides mainstream titles such as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, freely available games such as the Quake-based Warsow and Nexuiz. Both are beautiful looking and a lot of fun. I have yet to play Tremulous, which is a team-based FPS with real-time strategy elements. I really should check that one out.

Part two is focused upon strategy games. I have always felt that there is a definite lack of strategy games on Gnu/Linux. Besides Freeciv and Loki’s port of Civilization: Call to Power, which I do not own, I’ve found many games are uninteresting or still in alpha.

Then again, I haven’t played Battle for Wesnoth yet, and considering that it is one of the games that most people think of when you say “strategy game for Gnu/Linux”, I probably should. I’m downloading it right now. I have played Loki’s port of Myth 2, and it is always fun to set up a chain reaction explosion.

Another game I should try is UFO: Alien Invasion. I’ve never played X-COM, but I’ve heard plenty of good things about it. Warzone 2100 is one that I haven’t heard of before. It is supposedly one of the first 3D RTS games ever, and it is now open source. I’m downloading that one, too. I have also been meaning to purchase Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood.

Part three continues to list the strategy games available for Gnu/Linux. Bos Wars, Dominion 3, FreeOrion, and of course the Total Annihilation-based Spring are among the games listed.

Part four is all about MMOs. A Tale in the Desert is a popular one, and I recall the developers mentioning that there are more subscriptions from Gnu/Linux users than Windows or Mac users. While a number of games are only playable using Wine or Cedega, quite a few have native clients. Vendetta Online is one of them, and so is the indie game Dofus.

I am sure that more games will be listed in future articles. For instance, Frozen Bubble is a really popular puzzle game. Missing from the list of strategy games was Tribale Trouble and Defcon, two games from two different indie developers. Lux, Darwinia, Pioneers, and Widelands were also missing. Pioneers is a Settlers of Catan clone, but with all of the press Catan has received for being on XBLA, Pioneers should be mentioned.

Hmm…if it is hard to catalog all the games available for Gnu/Linux, perhaps “Linux has no games” isn’t such a true statement anymore.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Personal Development

Feminism and Video Games

In What Do We Do About Video Games?, Roy looks at how women and race are portrayed in one of his favorite pastimes, and he isn’t impressed.

In a previous post, I’ve suggested that girl-friendly games aren’t needed so much as games that appeal to non-gamers. I still believe it, but I think that there can be a problem if you are attracting non-gamers using stereotypes and highly-sexualized imagery.

While I mentioned that women as playable characters seem rare, the problem with most of them is that they are highly sexualized. You have Samus Aran, Princess Morning, and a handful of others. And then you have Lara Croft and the Dead or Alive girls with their realistic boob physics.

Who within the industry is actually concerned about these issues? Should they be concerned? I think so. When most of the industry has no problem with hyper-sexualized female characters in games, what can you expect when games cross over into politics and social discussions?

Add to that the fact that the most vocal critics of video games tend to be people like Jack Thompson or NIMF (the National Institute on Media and the Family) who accuse video games of being murder simulators or promoting cannibalism- and you’ll find that a lot of gamers are particularly hostile towards criticism of gaming, even from fellow gamers. Women and feminists are made unwelcome in many gaming circles, and concerns about sexism and racism in games go unheard, ignored, or mocked.

While I am not a fan of Jack Thompson, he does make a point about the problems of an industry that does not self-regulate. Someone will eventually want to do the regulating for you. We’re already batting down anti-video game legislation right and left like King Kong on a skyscraper, and that legislations is about pornography and violence. What happens when people suggest that the Final Fantasy or Soul Caliber series is little more than pornography for adolescents, simply because of the way that the characters look? Grand Theft Auto is already considered pornography by some.

And that’s just the legal aspect of it. What about the gamers? If you think there isn’t a problem with girls playing games, read Monica’s comment on Roy’s post:

I have the double duty of being both a gamer and game designer. My bigges pet peeve is the fact I can’t even play Halo or Unreal online with out virulent harassment. And not only sexual but sexually violent taunts, come-ons, and threats, mostly associated with men and even boys who are virtually emasculated by a girl gamer who has the audacity to win, beat them, or even pick up an item that the male player wanted. After several incidents where I logged off of Halo 2 literally crying, my husband suggest I just stop playing online, and sadly that’s exactly what I had to do.

I love games and gaming. Heck, I’ve devoted my life to it. But I am worried about where this- well, it’s not even sexism, per se…it’s actual hate- comes from. I can’t help but agree that oftentimes my employers and fellow game-buying populace (myself included) are to blame.

Play an online game, and try to avoid encountering 11-year olds taunting you by calling you a “weak bitch” or any number of misogynistic comments. Young boys and men will tell you how “gay” you play. These aren’t a bunch of friends playing on your LAN. These are complete strangers saying hurtful things to taunt you.

Even when things seem nicer, it isn’t so great. If you’re a woman or playing as a woman, you’ll find that people will try to “help” your character because they assume you can’t do well on your own. If helping involves stealing your kills, preventing you from gaining experience, it doesn’t help and actually gets in the way.

Homophobia and misogyny can seem to be the rule when playing online, to the point that people don’t think of them as something that can be changed. Boys will be boys. Just ignore them, and move on. Get a thicker skin. I think it is just an extension of nastiness on the Net, and it isn’t something that should be tolerated.

Even if you ignore the other players online, the games themselves could do better. There is nothing wrong with sexy characters in games. Sexy isn’t the problem. You can have a sexy character that is still a strong female lead. The problem is ambulatory breasts and anthropomorphic sex fantasies as playable characters being the rule rather than the exception.