GBGamesI finally got Internet access at my new apartment, so I am back in business! Check out the results of a quick speed test at DSL Reports:
w00t!! For the past week I’ve been finding indie games while I was at work, but now I can download them. Last night, I downloaded a bunch at once, and they were all on my hard drive within moments.
me.setEmotion( EMOTION_HAPPY );
Christmas Eve is a big deal in my family, and so after dinner, my girlfriend and I traveled from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio to spend the week with her family, where Christmas Day was more important. We drove through a huge bank of fog, otherwise known as Indiana. Loads of fun, that fog. Luckily, I played a number of games during that week.
Her cousin is a huge gamer, and so we played Super Mario Strikers among other Gamecube games. Playing with four people was definitely a lot of fun, and kicking explosives at soccer players made it feel like European soccer. B-)
I also brought my Gameboy from the 80s. Yes, the big, clunky one that was pocket-sized fun that didn’t actually fit in your pocket yet. It had Tetris, which helped pass the time when my girlfriend was driving. I still haven’t gotten the huge rocket, but then I didn’t play it as much as my sister or mother. I had other games to occupy my time…games that I still haven’t completed. B-(
I played more games of Sorry! in two days than I think I have ever played in my life. My girlfriend’s nephew really liked playing the game. I also played Lunch Money, which is a fun card game about school yard bullying. I haven’t participated in a LAN party in some time, but I managed to keep up with my trash talking abilities.
My girlfriend’s nephew and I also played on the computer a bit. He wanted to go to Nick.com to play Nickelodeon-related games. The games weren’t all that compelling, but for a six-year-old, they would be perfectly fine; however, what the heck was up with all of the ads? Everytime we clicked on a new game, we had to sit through the same Lucky Charms ad. Over and over. I get it! He gets the cereal! Can we assume that I’ve seen this ad?!? I would even have accepted a different ad, but no ads would have been preferred.
After I got fed up with the ads, I took him over to check out Puppy Invaders over at PuppyGames.net. It’s a cool Space Invaders clone, and it is playable on the homepage. He really liked this game, and it was fun since I controlled movement while he shot at the enemies. He also really liked the smart bombs, even though they didn’t do anything more than end the current level. We had good, old-fashioned quality fun. No stupidly repetitive ads here.
But there was still a lot of Sorry!.
The 2006 Independent Games Festival finalists have been announced. Among the finalists are a few games that run on Gnu/Linux, such as Darwinia, Tribal Trouble, and Professor Fizzwizzle.
I’ve played those three games, if only in demo form, so I know they’re good. I’m also in the middle of reviewing Weird Worlds, another finalist which is also really good.
I decided to check out a few of the other games. For instance, Glow Worm looked like a typical match-3 puzzle game, but it is a finalist for Innovation in Visual Art, so I had to check it out. It definitely deserves to be in the running, and it is a fun game to boot. I also tried Strange Attractors. Well, actually tried isn’t a good word. I got to level 25. I should have gone to sleep, but I couldn’t help it. And that giant head! I would have destroyed it if I hadn’t teleported and got stuck right into those damaging electric beams!
Suffice it to say that the 2006 IGF looks like it is full of quality games.
I’ve been asking certain Gnu/Linux-using friends to test out Oracle’s Eye while I work on it. I’ve already found that I need to specify SDL_image as a requirement because of such testing; however, I don’t want to have to send an 8MB source package that contains mostly useless-for-the-tester code or binary data. Asking someone to get such a huge download and build a project themselves just to check it out or test it is asking too much, I think.
Since they don’t need the source to test it, I can just put together the binary files I need and send them together in a tar.gz or zip file. Or so I thought.
I stumbled upon one of the things that developers face when they are new to Gnu/Linux: shared libraries that prevent distribution of your binary files. When you distribute the source and expect people to build it usually isn’t a problem, but I don’t anticipate all of my end users being proud geeks who wouldn’t mind spending hours getting my game to work again when it was working perfectly fine previously.
I have two Gnu/Linux systems, one which runs Debian Testing, with a 2.6 kernel and GCC 4.0.2, and the other which runs Debian Stable, a 2.4 kernel, and GCC 3.3. I don’t update the latter often because I use it as a backup machine. I don’t want to accidentally introduce incompatibilities that would prevent it from working properly.
When I brought my “release” over to the other machine and tried to run it, I got the following:
./oracleseye: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Let me just say that searching for solutions to this issue is difficult. You get a lot of results that aren’t relevant. Or I did, anyway. And I knew it had to be possible. Quake 3 Arena works fine, and I’ve upgraded libstdc++ a number of times, so why can’t my own code work so nicely?
So I asked on IRC, but people who leave their clients running all day even if they aren’t there are not too helpful. I searched some more, posted a question gamedev.net, but then found the possible solution immediately after the post.
Linking libstdc++ Statically by Johan Petersson talks about the exact problem I am having and offers a solution that is easy and seems elegant.
Basically, you need to statically link to both libstdc++ AND libgcc. GCC won’t let you do one without the other. And so far it seems to work.
I managed to get my code to run on my main system, my backup system, and my work system, and I no longer have to recompile on each. It only adds 0.5MB to my download, and I may even get better results once I stop using the debug build options. I’m not sure if there is a “better” solution, but I’m pretty happy for now. Thanks, Johan!
My friend Becky Kramer tuned me into The Freesound Project, a “collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.”
Basically, all the sounds in the project are available under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. You can creatively change a work and use the derivative work commercially or noncommercially. You could take the original and distribute it in a noncommercial way.
Sounds great to me, especially for my early projects. I’ll pay for my audio needs when I think doing so will help sell my games. For now, when I am just trying to make simple games for myself, these freely available sounds will be good enough.
Linux News says Digital Rights Management Picking on the Wrong People is an article to defend Free and Open Source Software against the charges that they are the ones who promote piracy.
I was surprised to hear from someone on the Indie Gamer Forums many months ago that all of the contact he had with FOSS was with people who only wanted things for free and would pirate everything from movies to games. There is also a lot of animosity towards FOSS in the ASP newsgroups, and a few months ago there was even an article in the newsletter about how FOSS was supposedly bad for business and didn’t offer any benefits to the public.
My experience is very different. I have a friend who refuses to buy DVDs because he doesn’t want to support the media cartel and the digital restrictions management used in most DVDs. I know people who pirate games and movies, but I also know people who refuse to use anything to do with Windows. If it isn’t available, they do without. After all, if you can’t play a game on Gnu/Linux, what would be the point in pirating it? Rather than break the law to watch his own movies, my friend just decides to be very selective with his DVD purchases. Revolution OS is one of the only DVDs I know that doesn’t use stupid region encoding, something that does nothing but punish paying customers while allowing commercial piracy to still occur.
In any case, it seems to me that most people who use Free and Open Source Software are fully aware of the licensed terms under which they may use their software. They are the ones who refuse to use Windows Media Player because they would prefer that their software doesn’t change the way their computer works without them knowing about when, how, and why. You can read the WMP EULA and see that it is pretty absurd what you have to agree to allow Microsoft to do. If anyone is committing piracy, whether casual or not, it’s more likely the people who don’t realize what it is the license allows them to do. Why would FOSS supporters be part of a group of people who ignore licenses and EULAs?
Sure, there are those who don’t care about the license and just want everything to be available at no cost. Open source usually is free-as-in-beer, and so if you want freely available software, it’s definitely safer than trying to get away with copying software illegally. Still, some people are going to make illegal copies of Windows, or games, or office software, or even shareware, and it is definitely possible that those same people might support FOSS.
But what a broad paintbrush we would have if we made the assertion that FOSS users in general are the ones who will most likely copy software illegally. It really makes no sense that people who consciously use FOSS to avoid vendor lock-in or support software freedom would at the same time pirate software that was proprietary or work only on a proprietary system that they are not using.
I guess I don’t interact with enough people outside of the FOSS community. I haven’t heard of too many people who believe that we’re all criminals or out to destroy the livelihoods of software developers or that we’re just anti-Microsoft zealots, but those people exist. Somehow they “heard” or “learned” what they believe FOSS is all about. They get almost as shrill defending what they think as people do when you try to tell them that copyright infringement is not the same as “theft”, and it is probably because the two issues are so related in their minds.
Maybe it is just because it is an issue related to copyright, which is fairly complicated and even people who think they know about it can be wrong. Maybe it is because FOSS is really different; when you’re driving an automatic all your life and someone gives you a manual, you’d freak out at first because you have no idea how to drive. “Why is it so complicated?! I just want to get from point A to point B!!” Or, since a lot of you are probably geeks likes me, it’s like when you give someone vi or emacs after they have been using text editors like Notepad or Pico for years. It’s a different way to think about typing. Similarly, FOSS is a different way to think about software.
Some people dismiss FOSS for their own good reasons. They’ve at least thought about it, researched it, and come to their own conclusions. But it seems that when I do meet people who “don’t get it”, they really don’t get it. They don’t understand that Free, with a capital ‘F’, as in Freedom, is different from free, lowercase ‘f’, as in “no cost”. “But why is it such a problem to pay for it?” It isn’t! There is no problem with paying for FOSS. People can’t wrap their heads around it because of the unfortunate double-meaning of “free”.
But people for some reason have no problem making the leap from “FOSS means no cost”, however erroneous that thought is, to “FOSS means stealing software”, which is an even worse assumption. While I believe some might have an agenda and would purposely lead people astray, and some other people might honestly feel that they are fighting a good fight to defend non-FOSS, I think most people just attack what they don’t understand.
I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I didn’t get to sleep until after 3:30AM, and I had to go to work today too. I’m dead tired.
The plot and dialogue seemed to move at a very quick pace in the beginning. I started to wonder if they purposely gave the older actors less lines. I also found that the movie deserves its PG-13 rating, and not just due to the parts with Voldemort, death, and destruction. There was quite a bit of sexual inuendo, and I felt that the movie would have fit at home in the 80s for some of the campy-ness. I mean, there is the dance scene, and Hagrid’s hands move “below the equator”, only to be moved back up by Madame Olympe Maxime. Wasn’t that right out of a movie like Revenge of the Nerds?
Not that it was bad. I really enjoyed the movie. It was both funny and disturbingly scary.
Your 15 Minutes is probably going to be one of those Internet phenomenons, and so I wanted to be among the early birds to mention it. You basically upload your photo, provide a short blurb, and now you will be featured on the front page of the website for 15 minutes.
Sorry, but I don’t have too much to say about it yet. I guess it is just First Post Syndrome. B-)
Tonight is the IGDA:Chicago chapter’s meeting for November. Alex Seropian of Wideload Games (and Bungie fame) will be giving a post mortem on Stubbs the Zombie.
I’ll be volunteering again, so if you show up, I’ll take your money. I don’t know if they will be selling shirts again.
Rant Mode Equals One: Score: Digital Privacy 0, Digital Piracy 1 is an interesting article talking about the problem with digital piracy.
But not the kind everyone thinks about. It isn’t trying to defend the movie, computer, and recording industries with their draconian copyprotection and laws. It’s an article arguing that individual rights are being compromised.
How does Sony get away with putting a root-kit on your system? Why is any company allowed to compromise the security of your computer just so they can determine that you haven’t made a copy, whether legally or not? And why are laws being passed to allow it?
Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just keep control of my own computer.