Player vs Environment

Stackless on Snow Leopard: 64-bit headache!

2011-05-30T13:17:00.008+08:00

For posterity, and my own sanity in future:

This is a reminder: Don't compile stackless in 64 bit mode on a Macbook Pro. Just don't. It will give you bus errors and segfaults on Keyboard Interrupts and sys.exit()'s. You will get annoyed and fire up gdb and ddd and try to debug it, and realise that it is a rabbit hole of gigantic proportions.

Just compile 32-bit and save yourself the headache. Others have the same wisdom.

CC="gcc -arch i386" ./configure --enable-framework --enable-stacklessfewerregisters

Just make sure any libs built that need to link against compiled python libraries (i.e. syncless) are also built in 32 bit mode, or you will get undefined symbol errors.

So for libevent, you might want to do:

CC="gcc -arch i386" CXX="g++ -arch i386" ./configure

Sure, things aren't running in their full 64-bit glory, but at least you can get on with your life.

One Button

2010-01-24T23:26:00.006+08:00

I have been trying to get a game done for a competition. The idea is that you create a game (for up to four players) that uses only one button (each): No extra directional inputs, keys, triggers, rotors, or Rez Vibrators. Ok, so that last one was output rather than input, but you get my drift. My friend Jack made an awesome one button game, which you can take a look at here.

Well, it has been hard. I started 2 weeks ago, when I was setting off on my annual family holiday. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, and if I could push myself into that area at least, I might have a chance of pulling it off, or at least discover something close by that was equally, if not more, fantastic. I snatched 20 minute programming sessions every now and then during the week, and got a really basic framework up and running, with some 5 minute graphics, but really not much else. Once home I lost a few days (nights) to sheer exhaustion. A bit more work done during the week fixing stuff that wasn't working properly, and the end of the week was lost to preparing and launching *water rockets*.

This is what I have now:

Basically the (small) red things are turrets which you can fire - weapon selection, angle, and power is handled with various length presses of a single button. The projectiles move and interact realistically using proper 2d physics rules.

With the Jan 30 deadline looming, and Global GameJam happening next weekend (beginning Friday), I am really going to have to pull out all the stops to get something finished by Thursday night. It is going to need to be a bit simpler than the idea I originally had, but I think there is enough juice in here to still come up with something really fun, which is achievable within the deadline.

We shall see.

Evenin' Squier

2009-10-13T00:27:00.004+08:00

I headed down to Kosmic Sound's BUTT sale on the weekend. I was supposed to be going to take a look at electronic drumkits: we have kind of semi-destroyed our Guitar Hero drumkit. I had a good look at Roland's VDrum TD series, and the Yamaha DTXPlorers, and was very impressed but I didn't buy anything. Kosmic normally sells these at a decent discount anyway and being a solid seller there were no 'special prices' happening for the BUTT sale.

I did however happen to notice a rack of Telecasters as I was walking out. In particular I noticed a very cheap Squier Affinity Telecaster which I felt compelled to question the helpful sales staff about, and also to strum gently to determine it's musical qualities versus its (low low) price. One thing lead to another and with a last minute 'crazy deal' done on the already ludicrous price, I ended up buying it.

And I am really glad I did - I was impressed instore with the range of sounds I could get out of the pickups and tone controls, and with the general quality of the fretboard. It turns out that several reviews agree, and my advice is that if you are looking for a hella cheap Tele for general mucking around (I have always wanted one, so this was the perfect excuse), you can't go past this bad boy.

I got so excited by how nice it felt to play, I did this quick and dirty demo of Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond, using a backing track I found (also awesome, although tricky to time the first solo to match the chord changes). I mainly use the neck pickup for solo 1 and the bridge pickup for solo2, so you really don't get a taste of what the middle pickup selector position sounds like, but hopefully you get the idea. I just used the simple but effective Pedal/Amp simulator in Garageband to get these sounds, rather than wake the house up with the loud (but better sounding) tube amp option.

Apologies to anyone who either doesn't care about guitars, or doesn't care about Pink Floyd.

Your Project is FAIL

2009-10-03T22:44:00.009+08:00

I originally wanted to entitle this post "The 7PM Project is a steaming turd on the face of Australian television, forged in the arsehole of Satan himself", but I have been trying to be a little less vitriolic in my opinions of late - my polarity has a tendency to get people a little offside. Plus, it was a little long as a title, don't you think?

Look, I don't watch much TV, I really don't. Documentaries, some sport, the Simpsons, and whatever is on while I am eating dinner or bottle feeding a child. The 7PM Project falls into this category, and I have developed a fairly intense dislike for it.

I just can't hold it in anymore.

A bunch of annoying, biro-waving gen-x tryhards attempt to discuss the news, and have a laugh. Besides the fact that they can't get competent cameramen or reliable link-ups to eastern states or overseas guests, the major flaw in the show is that it is not actually funny. With no experienced team members on board, the hosts stumble from topic to topic with awkward segues, trailed off sentences, and cheap, nervous jokes. I realise it is early days for this show, but the whole thing is pumped full of young hipster overconfidence and bravado, feeling that if they just keep it up and don't crack, nobody will realise that they don't know what they're doing. It's a bit like watching Bambi learning to walk, except Bambi is drunk and belligerent: smug, and obsessed with his own self importance, desperately trying to puff himself up to look slick and hip, and hopefully get some more followers on Twitter.

It is just another in a line of Channel 10 programmes designed to not cost them anything - content that has already been written, and is able to be repackaged and redeployed as another half hour of filler-medium, vomited directly into our wide open gullets as a vehicle for advertising and cross promotion. Their bullshit 20 To 1 clone Spearman Experiment is another example. The only show I hate more than these is Good News Week, and that is only because Paul McDermott is so thoroughly detestable.

I am so glad I happened to switch over to ABC2 and catch Hungry Beast on Thursday night. The presenters didn't grate on me. They had a mix of real news and funny stories. The show actually seemed packed with content rather than trying to pad out half an hour. Plus, it turns out that these are the guys who fabricated the report claiming evidence that Sydney citizens were the most gullible in Australia, believing whatever stories they read in the media. Creating the fictitious Levitt Institute, the Hungry Beast crew planted the story in the Australian media consciousness and waited for the sharks to close in and the water to churn.

Several news outlets picked up on it including, you guessed it, The 7PM Project. What is both shocking and amusing is that within the actual text of the report is the admission that the entire thing is a hoax and not at all factual - a point missed by many Australian reporters as they eagerly pumped out a headline without bothering to have someone RTFA. In the case of The 7PM Project it was a bitter irony that a show which has smugly tut-tutted the growing trends of churnalism (citing Richard Wilkins' erroneous reports of Jeff Goldblum's death as a prime example), they blurted the 'Gullibility' story out on national television without having actually checked any facts. A bitter, salty pill of irony, that vaguely smelled of shit.

On the other hand, not only was Hungry Beast beautifully and professionally presented, it was well researched, hilarious at times, had interesting factual tidbits between segments, and left me wanting more. I realise that it is a weekly programme rather than the 'every night, live to your living room' approach taken by The 7PM Project..so really, guys, take the hint - it's not working. Do you really need to be on every night? Do you really need to be live? Is it worth 3 camera screw ups and losing a link-up to an interviewee every show for you to be live on air?

And the metro whip around. WTF is that? I'll tell you what it is: Lame. Its filler. A chance for failing radio 'personalities' or shit comedians from each capital city to try desperately to be funnier than whoever was on just before them. It is quite sad to watch actually - almost as sad as the little segment they have in Good News Week where they take turns stepping up to the spotlight to try to deliver a punchline to a joke that was never going to be funny, and all end up resorting to the type of smut we all left behind in grade 5. That takes the cake, because Australia can do much better, and also because the presence of a spotlight on that show causes a nationwide anxiety at the prospect that Paul McDermott might try to leap out and sing something.

Oh, and your website sucks too. The least you can do is use a spell checker or have someone proofread your taglines, and be consistent about punctuation. Yes, I am looking at the full stops.

From the 7PM Project website. Can you spot the 5 typographical mistakes?
(The missing page element is not a typographical mistake, it is just other random fail.)

While I was over at the 7PM Project forums, I actually found a lot of other people complaining about the show, the content, the hosts...everything really. The surprising thing is that there are just legions of people who defend this show vehemently - I have no idea why. Being 'new' or being a 'comedy show' is apparently an excuse for poor journalism and unprofessionalism. You know I probably wouldn't be so incensed if this show wasn't on EVERY DAMN NIGHT, but it is there pushing me, pushing me every day. This is where the diehards on the forums would say 'Why complain? Why watch it? Just watch something else!". You know, that argument just doesn't work. If nobody complained and everybody just switched to something else, nothing would get any better, and we would have a metric shit-tonne of channels full of banal monkey turds instead of a handful of channels flecked with brilliance and only slightly mottled with mysterious brown marks. The 7PM project is probably more of a smear.

So if this was a real project, here is what the repord card would say:

The 7PM Project. Did not deliver on promised themes:

Savvy: No. You cant even detect facebook hoaxes.

Unique: No, you are just a younger, less experienced and unfunny The Panel.

Smart: Not smart enough to research your stories, or have funny people as your panelists. Even your website is shit.

Funny: See above. Carrie Bickmore is your worst offender, but even still your average funny rating is 'Peanuts/Garfield'.

Lastly, your tagline 'News but not as you know it' does not actually mean anything, it just makes it sound like you have a premise for the show. It is also untrue as you actually do deliver the news as we know it: Inaccurate and humourless. Bad penmanship, marks off.

Final Mark: FAIL, even though you tried so hard, so desperately desperately hard: Unfortunately it doesn't count for anything.

More from the 7PM Project Website:
It would help if you could spell the old name correctly.

Also, Spearman Experiment fails too.

The Kernel

2009-09-30T14:51:00.004+08:00

This morning I was directed to a chart showing the amount of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time. Interesting for a quick look, a chuckle at the slow decline of cerain words or a sudden, sharp increase in another.

I spent 10 minutes and downloaded the source for 2.6.28.10, and ran a few of these:

grep -ir 'something' * | wc -l

Here is a chart, showing that the kernel probably has more to worry about than sweary developers...

Does

2009-08-22T00:42:00.006+08:00

I was just about search Google for some information on how iTunes does its importing and storage in its internal library. I went to the search bar - you know, the little text field in the top right corner of your browser - and started typing.

does iTu

In between typing 'does' and 'iTunes', the bar popped up its list of suggestions, gathered from its continual evaluation of keystrokes of millions of monkeys around the world. Something caught my eye. BACKSPACEBACKSPACEBACKSPACE. There it was again - the list of search suggestions just based on the word 'does'.

The top hit: does he like me

I have to say this really made me stop for a second. I found it both sweet and innocent in its naiveté, but also a sad reminder of the irrationality of human beings, the uncertainty of relationships, the needless insecurities people burden each other with, and the sheer foolishness of typing questions like this into Google. A sign of our technology saturated times, or just the modern interpretation of the classic fortune teller? A sounding board for questions, giving vague answers that we can interpret however we like. A magic 8-ball, of sorts.

The full list looked like this:

does he like me
does obama smoke
does hydroxycut work
does extenze work
does smooth away work
does he love me
does it offend you yeah
does ups deliver on saturday
does rihanna have herpes
does alli work

I am seeing an overrepresentation of what I assume to be hair product/procedure queries. I am glad #6 and #1 aren't reversed, because #1 is a frivolous, but #6 is a little more distressing. Speaking of distress, #9 could be a bit of a bomb for Rihanna.

The Pragmatic Designer

2009-08-12T21:49:00.009+08:00

Last night I gave a presentation at The Velvet Lounge for the IGDA Perth Chapter. The topic was 'Design', which is a pretty immense beast to tackle, and there are people far better qualified than me to impart their pearls of wisdom on the subject. What I can offer though, are the lessons I have personally learned from my time in the industry.

There was a really good turnout - The 50 or 60 people there were a very kind audience. For the rest of you that couldn't make it, shame on you!. Even so, here is a quick summary of my presentation.

I started with a little bit of background on myself as a gamer, and the gaming systems I have owned. Turns out I was the only one in the room who has a Vectrex. I gave a quick rundown of my time at Interzone, explained how Gamejams work, and plugged RocketHands, the indy games studio I have started with friends. Then I talked about The Eight - the eight 'points' I wanted to make.

1. Everyone's a designer.

Anyone who has played a game and thought 'That was good but heres what I would do...' is essentially a designer. This doesn't mean they are a good designer though. And it's not all about 'coming up with ideas'. That is almost the least important part. To cut the mustard, you need have the vision to see a concept through to implementation, to be able to work out instinctively which ideas will fly and which will die, and to be able to tweak the knobs for maximum fun.

2. Games > Toys

Nick Lowe wrote an excellent post on this very topic just a few weeks ago. Really all I was getting at here is that making robust game experiences can be tough, and it can be tempting to tear all the internal walls down and just erect a huge cage around the play area, and end up with a sandbox - this is generally a loss for the player. The idea of a toy (the example was a spinning top) is not as appealing as the idea of a game (Monopoly), and the difference is short term goals, long term objectives, which the former lacks. Tim Best happily supplied the audience answer that I needed - that conflict is the driver of drama, and by extension, it is the choices that characters make in the face of conflict which is interesting. I urged potential designers to give their players choices.

3. Don't Innovate Too Much

Innovation is good, and I am not a fan of games doing the same thing over and over. But if you are going to innovate heavily try to keep it focussed in its 'sphere of relevance', rather than delivering heavy innovation in a bunch of areas. Why? Because it freaks people out, Man! It can be too much for the mainstream to take, and all you will end up with is a tiny (but fanatical) fan base (i.e. your mum), and 'Retro Reviews' in five years time that will state that your game was "ahead of it's time", which is a nice way of saying it sucked. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do bizzare things in games, or challenge convention - by all means go nuts. Just make sure it is focussed and relevant to the goals of your game design, rather than innovating in every area just for the sake of feeling like you need to be different.

4. Finding Fun is Fractal

A lot of the time, as a game designer, you don't know if something will definitely be fun. You are pretty sure it will be, but it will probably need some tweaking - it is rare that these things are perfect 'out of the box'. So you need to jump in there and try it - find what is fun, what is not, iterate on it, and try again. This is a pretty well known process, and the general rule here is that you tend to find the rich veins of fun pretty quickly, after which you can move onto the smaller 'tributaries of enjoyment'. The point here is that timewise, you get diminishing returns: It doesn't just start being more fun because you spend more time on it. Learn to know when to move on to the next thing.

5. You Ain't Gonna Need It

This is exactly the same as the programmer maxim. Video games often have mechanics modelled on real world behaviours. With a knowledge of the workings of those real world systems, it can be tempting for designers to want to simulate these sorts of systems accurately. Once you have played D&D, everything becomes a nail, if you catch my drift. The reality is, often you can get away with just faking it. In fact, often it feels more realistic to the player if you do. And the programmers hate you less. And there are less bugs. In conclusion, never simulate anything.

Ok so that last part was a joke. But seriously Seamus Young has a similar story.

6. Balancing: The Endless Road

Not much to say here except that balancing gets harder as your game gets bigger, and takes longer than you think it will. Hopefully producers know this too, and allocate time in the development budget for it. You will probably find you need programming support to provide you with the data you need for balancing, and possibly a bunch of focus testing.

On the subject of balancing, it always blows me away to think of what I heard one of the World Of Warcraft designers say on their forums. He said (and I am paraphrasing) 'The objective of our game balancing is for every class to say that the other classes are all overpowered'. Not only is that right on the money for what they need to be doing, but damn. Tall order.

7. Positive Reinforcement

This is also a pretty simple point. It is tempting to punish players when they don't 'play the game right'. It is better to use encourgament and reward as your learning tool though. A related concept is the Candy Shop Girl. This relates psychologically to the positive reinforcement idea, but even more so to managing player expectations: It is especially relevant for games that release new content and features via periodic updates on the web.

There is a candy shop with two candy girls behind the counter. Their job is to measure out the correct weight of candy for a customer. Candy Girl #1 fills her huge scoop and empties it into the bag and weighs it. She successively subtracts portions from the bag until the weight is correct, and then gives the customer the candy.

Candy Girl #2 works a little differently: Initially she only fills her scoop a little bit, and empties that into the bag. Being underweight, she needs to keep fetching more scoops of candy and adding them to the bag, till it is the correct weight.

Now, in the end, the customer gets the same amount of produce, but Candy Girl 2 is the favourite, because she is always giving, rather than taking away. The lesson here for Games Design is that if you have features or game elements that are at all at risk of needing to be pulled (they are buggy, they aren't fully tested, you don't know if they are quite right), then don't put them in. If you release them and have to pull them, players will get annoyed - you really don't gain anything by having put them in your game. If you hold your cards close to your chest and only release when you are really sure you won't have to pull any content, you won't have to be a 'subtracter', like Candy Girl #1.

8. Become a Baby Killer

A very simple one to finish things off. The golden rule is: Ideas are cheap. Do not get emotionally attached to them. As a game designer, you will go to many a meeting where game ideas are tossed around on a table like baseball cards, and the ones that don't make the grade will be shredded. In a shredder purchased from the OfficeWorks in hell. You need to be comfortable with the reality that every idea you come up with can and probably will be shot down. Most often by your co-workers, and sometimes by yourself. Let it go, learn from it, and move on. You need to be able to kill your babies, and feast on their tasty experience.

That was pretty much the end of the useful content, but I also touched on something much more sinister: the dark underbelly of my presentation was to expose something that has been kept quiet for far too long. A festering sore on the face of games development: The ancient enmity between Games Designers and Games Programmers. It was time to speak up. But I could only express it with Lego. Anything else would simply cut too deep.

Thats really how it happens folks. These short documentaries channel a vicious reality that you really don't want to experience. Thats why I had to do it in plastic - I am protecting you.

These are my first brickfilms, so be kind ;)

My thanks to IGDA Perth for the opportunity to rant. I mean present.

Epic Lewt

2009-07-13T12:56:00.006+08:00

I didn't get to go to SupaNova, although I really wanted to. They had a pretty sweet ticket deal that would have granted access to both days plus the exclusive Friday Night session, which had the Watchmen Motion Comic, with an introduction by original artist Dave Gibbons. Gibbons was of course the whole reason that I wanted to go - that and taking my little boy to see Yuri Lowenthal do the voice of Ben 10, that would have been awesome.

But I couldn't go - I just had other things happening, and I couldn't justify the time away or the expense. After all, I have 400 babies. Hopefully some of my friends would be going, and could tell me all about it later.

Well it turns out they did. And it turns out, that they are truly awesome friends:

Last Thursday night I was presented with this, and I was speechless. In a weaker moment I might have cried - it certainly seemed a valid option. I know of two instigators, one who I am sure would rather remain anone-mous (see what I did there?), and the other is your friend and mine, Dan "KingLord" Eichling, who is normally to be found over on the red couch at Teh Learning Curve. I may find other conspirators, and if so, their names will be published here so that all may see what fantastic, kind, thoughtful people you are. You bought me a Watchmen and had it signed by the artist. Hopefully, some day, when you least expect it, I am gonna get you back.

But for now, I know the happiness that only material possessions can bring. This is Bind on Equip of the highest nature. Pride of place my friends, pride of place.

Misty Mountain Hop

2009-07-07T10:19:00.000+08:00

So I am driving in my car, and I am singing along to music. Actually it is not music, it is Zeppelin: You must understand that the Seasons album (Zep IV) transcends music and becomes some sort of neural trance feed. Mere music is not this enjoyable. Cars are convenient for singing - with the windows up and the engine roaring they are relatively sound proof to the outside observer, and your CD player and speakers are conveniently located inside the framework of the car. Really a car is a Mobile Personal Performance Environment.

I am driving through the Perth CBD in my Mobile Personal Performance Environment, CD player cranked, absolutely belting out Misty Mountain Hop. Any follower of Robert Plant would know that one does not sing Led Zeppelin. Wail, or do not wail. There is no sing.

"Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see..."

The undulating melody of the line spread over an unusual but regular measure is really just a set up for the complete ambush that is the next line. The next line which incorporates the highest and most forceful notes in the song. The pinnacle of the entire piece. The global maxima. I was pulling up to the lights, which was a boon, since I needed utter concentration to wrench enough essence from my soul in order to enact this tour de force.

I pulled up with enough time to brace myself, and hence I was committed.

"And baby baby baby do you like it?"

I am sure you can imagine. Eyes closed, head thrown back, face contorted in such public ecstasy, and freeing some sort of epic god-howl from the depths of my being. I am not sure how long the moment lasted, but when I opened my eyes it was still daytime, and the lights hadn't yet changed. I blinked a few times and looked over at the car next to me, and noticed the lady inside, who had been watching me. Now that I was looking at her, I sensed she was embarrassed.

Because she was laughing at me.

The poor woman was trying to control herself, she really was, but she just couldn't help it. The sight of a young man singing so enthusiastically, looking like he is vomiting his heart up to music that she couldn't even hear was just too much for her. She tried to conceal it, looking away, hiding her face, and instinctively bringing her hand up to her mouth in such an innocent, childlike gesture, sensitive to my feelings. Still, she was unable to quash the telling, involuntary spasming of her body, even as the powerful hilarity subsided.

The light was still red, and she hazarded a look back, her eyes filled with awkward hope that I would somehow not have noticed her, that her cloaking ploy had succeeded, and that I would still be captivated by the musical goings-on in my own little world. Being a long time car-singer, I am pretty much impervious to the reactions of others, so when she met my confident gaze she flinched a little, conscious of our subtle role-reversal.

I flashed back a grin, both acknowledgement and endorsement of our private, unspoken conversation. And she smiled back across the vaccum between us, relieved and unashamed.

The light turned green and the sounds of Misty Mountain Hop roared back into relevance, and we began to move off. I felt mixed emotions. Glad that we had been able to share in the backwash of a neutralised moment of potential social unease, but sorry that she was missing out on the absolute party that was going on inside my Mobile Personal Performance Enviroment.

"So I've decided what I'm gonna do now.
So I'm packing my bags for the Misty Mountains where the spirits go now,
over the hills where the spirits fly."

I should be drinking a toast to friends, instead of these comedians.

2009-03-07T21:39:00.000+09:00

Last week, I had to say goodbye to my good friend Joseph, who had to go back to the US. He gave me a fantastic set of bookcases, and in return I did what any games industry colleague would do - I invited Joseph and Jeremy over to my place to play video games. Actually that is a bit misleading - in truth they came over to help me move the bookcases into position, but I swear we played Super Mario Galaxy beforehand, and some sort of Boob Qix afterwards. Plus, Nat cooked them dinner.

In fact, here we are in the middle of a Boob Qix session on my arcade machine:

I will miss Joseph, mainly for all the insightful design conversations we had, but also because he is the main person who loves Watchmen as much as I do, and now we can't talk about how great it is on a daily basis. Well, not easily.

Nat and I went to see the movie last night, and it really is rather good. Obviously the graphic novel has to be adapted to the movie format, and this is normally the easiest thing to screw up. They didn't screw it up though - it works perfectly. They cut where they should have cut, and altered what they should have altered. And all us fan-boys get to see the extra stuff on DVD, so everybody wins.

They did a great job of casting - nobody overshadowed or upstaged anyone else. The performances seemed very pure, and very believable. The actors interpreted their roles brilliantly, the costumes and sets were fantastic, and Alan Moore's genius dialogue shines through - poetic and poignant without sounding rehearsed or unnatural.

The cinema was full of 18-25 year olds (I assume most of them would be unfamiliar with the original graphic novel), who decided that Doc Manhattans penis needed commentary every time it appeared, and that Miss Jupiter's 'encounter' with the Comedian deserved laughter. As the movie went on and it's enormous vision sank in, this started to die away. Nobody cared about blue dicks by the end of the movie, I can tell you that much.

I give it two broken thumbs up.

Holiday!

2009-01-18T15:07:00.000+09:00

It is appropriate to have the Madonna song 'Holiday' running through your head at this point. It may even be required.

I went on holiday this past week to Mandurah - specifically to the Bouvard/Dawesville area. We holidayed with three other families - the Baileys, the Norrises, and the Kellys, with whom we shared a house. The following things happened:

The beach (no sharks)
Peel Zoo (Ostriches are huge)
Abingdon Miniature Village (Infested with mosquitoes and then we discovered the bees. KILLAH BEES!)
Expensive pastries (delicious)
Guitar Hero (Bailey singing 'I wanna turn you on...' from "Today" - priceless)
Greed (the game, not the deadly sin)
Barbequeued meet (Norry did a fantastic job)
Golf (my best was a bogey.)
Ginger Beer
Upwords (Entire scoring game played in the last few turns)

On a less exciting note for most, I did some programming. I found a few code optimisations that should get me a whole bunch more frames in recent gamedev outings. I was also obsessed with getting our Virgin Mobile Broadband modem to work under Linux. Thanks to usbmodeswitch and some config file tweaking, I was able to get the modem to detect just fine. Then I used a little pppd chat config file that looked like this:

ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT ERROR
REPORT CONNECT
TIMEOUT 10
"" "ATZ"
OK "AT&F"
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","virginbroadband"'
SAY "Calling...\n"
TIMEOUT 120
OK "ATD*99***1#"
CONNECT \c

Viola, as they say. I could connect to Virgin Mobile Broadband from my ubuntu laptop. Pretty pointless, but it was a victory of sorts.

On the last day of the holiday we called in to the Mandurah markets on the way home, just for a look. I picked up a book called 'Dictionary of the Occult and Esoteric', and began to flip through. It had all sorts of entries describing the stuff of legend, religious figures and ceremonies, secret societies and pagan rituals, and creatures of folklore. I decided I would buy this book if it had definitions for 3 words:

Pegasus: Check!
Kobold: Check!
Manticore: Check!

Purchased. $10. Bargain. The cherry on top of a fantastic holiday with friends.

One paragraph to rule them all

2008-12-28T21:28:00.001+09:00

This is like shaving, I swear it is.

I suck at shaving. I have an electric shaver, which is a good thing - as long as you shave every few days (if not every day), shaving with an electric shaver is fine. It does a decent job, with a minimum of effort. Therin lies the seeds of complacency. From a clean, freshly shaven face, each day's miniscule iteration blends into those of previous day's, and before you know it you resemble a gruff sea captain. One more day. One more tenth of a millimeter - It won't make that much difference...I'll shave tomorrow. It goes on for weeks. And then I am Chewbacca. In that situation, trying to shave with an electric shaver is like trying to mow the lawn with a whippersnipper, but with more physical pain. So out come the cheap manual razors, with their mysterious duality. On the one hand, they are sharp, like a ninja's katana - eager for blood and possessing an enthusiastic eagerness to mame he who weilds them. On the other hand, they seem to want to clog with hair, like an overachieving shower drain in a dormatory at a high school for early developing boy-chimpanzee experiments. I end up having to chop my face up with one of these every time. I haven't used my electric razor in at least 6 months.

And so it is with blogging. I keep meaning to write stuff on here, but it doesn't happen. And now I am going to recap 4 months in a paragraph. One paragraph to rule them all.

I got to go to a couple of places for work: In Paris I ate snails, walked about 15km, and took a million photos. In San Diego I ate good mexican and as much untried varieties of fast food as I could (it's good!). I did a metric bunch of work both home and abroad, and barely logged into World Of Warcraft. I got Guitar Hero World Tour for my birthday (The nice lady at the KMart layby desk 'found' me a 'spare' copy 'out the back' after I was told my actual copy that I had been paying off for over a month had been sold to someone else. Or should I say 'someone else'). I played it a bit and then had to open up my drums and solder a bunch of joints. I played it some more and then had to open it up again and solder more joints. I am either hitting it too hard, or the assembly line workers are being whipped too hard. There is enough material here for a HUGE rant, but I can't! I am Chewbacca! All I can do is HHHUUUUURRRRNNNNNGGGGHHHH. GHWT is awesome though. I saw ultrasound pictures of my littlest one. I became Lead Designer at Interzone. I made a game for gamejam, but I just havent had time to finish it. It is about a little white rabbit mutant who escaped from the lab and has all sorts of crazy powers. I made a dollshouse for my daughter for Christmas, and I DID finish that. It rocks out, and makes me wish I was a 5 year old girl.

So there it is, in one paragraph. In conclusion, I should shave more often. HHHHUURURRRRRGGGNNNHH!!

And now, with great mysteriousness, I will work on some software I have not touched in a long time. A long time. If I am successful it might prompt me to mention something about it on this blog thingy.

Goodbye 2008. You have been alright, you know, for a year. We were never really close. I guess that's my fault.

Epic Fail

2008-10-24T01:20:00.000+08:00

Wow. I am bad at this blogging thing. I can't deny it takes some devotion: or at least some free time.

I have neither. Time to free it up.

Fathers Day

2008-09-09T00:28:00.001+08:00

I had a fantastic Fathers day. So fantastic, that it has taken me two days to write about it. Such is the recuperation time for so much joy.

I slept in till 10:30. Trust me, that is a big deal. When I woke, I read Retro Gamer and was presented with bacon and eggs. So much that I couldn't finish it. I actually had to leave food on my plate. Ahh, the opulence.

I was given some lovingly hand crafted drawings of a princess, some handmade cards, and an ultra bright torch that can fry your eyes out.

I sat down and played Smash Bros: Brawl for 2 hours. I mashed the controller until my thumbs were pulp and it was bliss. I really started to feel the intricacies of each character, and get a feel for some very subtle nuances in the game. This was so refreshing, since the rest of the game is devoted to cartoon violence hyperbole, and the contrast was like chicken with lemon and prosciutto: Delicious.

Then I cleaned out the shed. I found that the spider situation was far less drastic than I had feared, and was the result of an overly visible minority. I thew out useless junk I didn't need, and uncovered other useless junk that I squirreled away for later. I categorised nuts, bolts, screws and nails in a tackle box, and hung tools on my hook board. At the end of the day I had a clean shed with plenty of room for lawn mowers and excess gutters, and everything where I can find it easily. Seriously folks, it doesn't get better than this.

Actually it does.

Then we went for icecream, and I came home and bought the id Megapack for half price off Steam, after a tip-off from my mate Jason.

BAM.

I'm not trying to crucify you

2008-07-28T22:18:00.000+08:00

It should be obvious by now that I am not the diligent blogger. Things happen to me during my day which I think interesting enough to blog about. 'Hark!', I say, 'Is this loathsome television programme not worthy of some sort of Internet Rant?', and 'Lo!, wouldst my casual observation about some everyday occurence not enrich the lives of countless who would hear it?'.

The answer of course, is Yes. And by Yes, I mean No.

So instead, I go nearly a month without posting anything. Both for the reason explained above, and also, because I am very lazy.

A few things happened that I feel need to be magnetically seared into a google-owned hard drive. Firstly, and let me preface this by saying that watching movie trailers off the internet doesn't excite me and in fact normally evokes my derision, people mindlessly wasting bandwidth on less than a minute of footage that they could see for free before any movie, desperate for Hollywood's table scraps, ravaging it before it even bounces on the floor, their Quicktime's buffering and their YouTubes clamouring for more of the stream, the moving patterns of colour needed to satisfy the rapacious hordes who can't wait a few weeks or months to just go see the damned movie, [I move away from the blog to breathe] firstly (yep pick the initial thread back up), firstly: Watchmen.

I have owned the comic for a good while now, but only read it recently. Having been an impulse 'Oh I will need that' purchase, I was saving it for a time when I desrved it. Months later, after much encouragement from Joseph and a great deal of 'being good', I finally decided I was worthy. Good thing I did, because it turns out to be fantastic. Seriously fantastic. I cannot rave about how good this is, and how much I admire Alan Moore. And I though From Hell was good - Watchmen blows it out of the water. So having been thouroughly impressed by the graphic novel, I was trembling with excitement to see the trailer for the movie. Is this what 'normal' people experience when hammering Apple's site for the latest dose of 35mm crack? Whether or not within me, some new empathy has been birthed for these lost, hopless addicts is beside the point - the Watchmen trailer is amazing, and looks to be a faithful adaptation of the comic. I was grinning like a loon with my face pressed right up to my monitor - I don't know if I have ever had such a high pixels to smile ratio. We will see how the movie fares in 2009, but for now, they have my interest.

Joseph, of Firefly-generosity fame, also gave me his old Nintendo DS, which I like to call DS Phat. Magnaminous. I fired up my GBA version of Super Mario World, and continued my painful struggle to discover the secret ending to Larry's Castle. The one that I am convinced is there, over the lava pit, but that nobody else on the entire of the interweb has found. I will be the first!. In other news, I should soon receive in the mail a small device which will enable me to run homebrew applications, DSLinux, and er.. backed up games on DS Phat. I cannot wait, and am checking the mail daily, rather than letting it build up and spew out of my mailbox like normal, leaving a soggy piles of pulpy-mush-regret on my lawn.

Speaking of spew, this made the rounds at the office the other day: ABC's Q&A programme talks about video game classification in Australia. Well, that is to say that the panelists fail to understand the question ('Why doesn't Australia have an 18+ rating for games like every other first world country') and then proceed to make random statements of opinion having no basis in any sort of fact, seemingly in order to fill the air with the sounds of their voices, and eat up precious seconds until the next question or ad break. It frustrated me because not only were these people misinformed or just plain ignorant, they are the types of people who are high enough in government to make a difference - you know..legislation and all that. It may as well have been 'The Internet is a Series of Tubes'. Once the initial animal noises had died down, and the speakers had each had a turn at condemning the specific game in question, other games of the same ilk, and also made up 'rape video games', and commenting on the moral health of any society that would consider such a thing entertainment, one panelist decided to ask the audience member who had posed the question, a question in return. She asked why this young man might want to play such a game, and how long he and his friends might spend playing it. As if to disarm the question, she added:

"I'm not trying to crucify you, I am just curious."

Had I been the audience member, I am not sure I would have been able to keep a straight face at such a question. You can bet if someone says 'I am not homophobic, but..', you are about to hear something about how queers should just be driven out of the country, or 'I am all for equal rights and everything, but...', normally bodes poorly for the female sex in the context of the forthcoming statement. So too does the prefix 'I am not trying to crucify you' mean that the speaker is a barefaced, unashamed, liar. The 'I'm just curious' part would have made me laugh - the show is meant to be serious discussion of issues, not idle chit chat and small talk.

My anger comes more from the implication that people need to justify wanting to play video games that are refused classification. If justification is needed, that is simple - "Because I like it". Why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do dickheads in the city drive huge 4WD's? Why do men buy porno mags and why do women need to read gossip about movie stars? "Because I like it". Of course, justification isn't needed, otherwise cigarettes would be illegal because they are harmful and 4WD's would require stricter licensing since they aren't actually needed by most people in the city.

I do respect the government's right to protect its citizens. We don't allow people to buy things that will hurt them - dodgy toasters or machinery that hasn't passed safety checks for example. This is not the case of a badly wired kitchen applicance though. In the case of media such as this, we have classification systems such as those for Music, Film, and Literature. Our classification system for video games is just a bit..behind the times and inconsistent - it lacks an 18+ rating for one. Nevertheless, updating our classifications system and including the aforementioned 18+ rating can only bring us in line with other countries, allow retailers the opportunity to sell games otherwise unavailable on our shelves, and help parents make educated decisions on games which their children may want to buy. Or, allow them to purchase it for themselves, which without this rating, no voting, drinking, sex-having adult can do lawfully.

People (and by people, I mean people that are not me) are ranting about this on this forum page.

Backstage, after the show:

“My kids played GTAIV, but thankfully didn’t go out and steal cars”

“Yep, my little Billy just completed that, and so far he has resisted the urge to steal cars too”

“You know what, my kids played it too and all of them are fine – I guess it is just good upbringing”

“Thanks to us.”

“Yep, we sure are good parents”

“Damn evil games. The evidence just mounts and mounts, and still they keep making them…”

“It’s those crazy programmers man. Remember the Y2K hoax back in 2000? ‘The computers are going to freak out everyone! We have to patch the mainframe!’. NOTHING HAPPENED you stupid nerds!”

“Stop, stop…seriously...you make me cry with laughter whenever you do the nerd voice and the squint thing..”

“Alright everyone, calm down. The meeting will come to order!”

“So..next on the agenda: Net Neutrality”

“Booooo-ooooring”….

“Ooooh oohhh…say it in the voice!. I want to see Kev cry again…”

Firefly

2008-07-01T20:49:00.001+08:00

With the appearance of Jewel Staite at the recent Supernova expo being held here in Perth, we happened to be talking about Firefly at work on Friday afternoon. After years of being told by various people how fantastic this series is, and an afternoon of praise from workmates, I decided to surprise Nat by hiring the entire series from the video shop to see how much we could get through over the weekend.

I am not a big TV guy - it generally needs to be animated for me to even pay attention. As for Joss Whedon - well let's just say I have never gotten into Buffy or Angel. In fact, it is probably better to say that I have tried to avoid those shows altogether.

So this was just obviously well written. Good dialogue, good story pacing, excellent characters - undeniably good entertainment. We got through a DVD per night - it would have been more if we didn't so gosh darned sweepy.

On Monday morning I was able to tell Joseph that we were 75% of the way through the series. And then something unexpected happened. From a JB HiFi bag Joseph pulled out two objects. His present to me - the entire Firefly series and ultimate edition Serenity DVDs. Monday mornings normally don't happen like this.

Shiny.

We get signal!

2008-06-09T22:54:00.002+08:00

Backstory: I am lucky enough to work as a games designer for Interzone. My work is primarily systems design, which means a lot of thinking about what sorts of mechanics and interactions might make a game fun and playable, and then doing a bunch of maths and prototyping to make sure it is actually feasible. I design the guts of games. Like, their intestines.

Actual Content: Anyway, after a really long period of biting our tongues, we can finally announce the title we have been working on all this time: Interzone Futebol!. As Dozer emphatically states in The Matrix: 'Its a very exciting time!'. Firstly, because we can finally talk about the game now (can you imagine how excruciating it is to work on something really exciting and not be able to tell any of your friends about it?), and secondly because gaming sites are starting to pick up the press release: Interzone Futebol is getting a mention on games sites like Gamers Hell, gi, SpawnPoint, DailyGamer, TenTonHammer, MondesPersistants (Persistant Worlds), and mcvuk.

Only one such as Big Kev had words that could adequately sum up this eventful occasion: "I'm Excited". And so is Joseph.

Update: IGN have an interview posted just over nyah.

#include "helloworld.h"

2008-06-09T21:56:00.000+08:00

I am generally not an early adopter.

This blogging thing has been around for years now, and I have had plenty of time and opportunity to get on the bandwagon, but I kept away. After a while, the whole culture and the words used to describe it really started to bug me. People were blogging, on their blogs, putting things into the blogosphere. I don't even know why I felt that way - I read and enjoy plenty of blogs. Some are thought provoking, some are entertaining, some are just plain smart, and others make milk come out of my nose. Good blogs deserve my time and electrons. Bad blogs, and by that I mean 99% of the blogs out there, are what make me cringe. I don't want to know about your trip to Nanna's cat farm or your hiking expedition to Lake Boring, or your obsession with that emo chick in your class, your lame fan fiction, or your vain grandstanding, or what song you are listening to, or what freaking mood you are in.

And there you have it. The realisation sets in that the people spewing out the text of their own life's journey is thouroughly distasteful to me, because I guess, I cant relate to it. It doesn't interest me, and therefore it is shite.

The Internet should be about me. You may only write about what I want you to write about. Since I can't trust any of you to do that, I shall have to do it myself. Or build some sort of atomic powered markov aggregator.