<3 Gaming

Lots of neat things have been eating up my time lately, just thought I would share a bit of the progress I have been making on them since it has been rather quiet around here lately.

PARPG:
I  may not have mentioned this here yet, but I recently became a full fledged developer on the open source indie game, PARPG (working title). It is an isometric 2d RPG set on a post apocalyptic earth. It is currently in super early development stages, and I really do mean super early. Mostly tons of back-end decisions and coding are in the works. Probably the two biggest undertakings (in the programming department) at the moment are the design and implementation of our questing engine as well as the restructuring of the limited GUI code we have right now so that its more modular. If anyone is interested in checking it out we should hopefully be releasing a tech demo of the game in late December I would guess, but depending on development speed it should be out this winter at the least.

I joined the project back in August of this year and it has been quite a learning experience so far. Who advancing your python skills through game development would be so enjoyable?

Subcreation:
Subcreation is also in the process of a bit of change. Currently I am working on getting us a blog up an running and fully integrated with our forum software. Currently I am working on translating the design of the forums over to the blog so that it is a seamless end-user experience and that should hopefully be up and running in another week or two.

The idea behind it is to get some of our more prominent community members to start blogging about their gaming experience’s from a Subcreation PoV, you know the whole “better gaming through intelligence” motif. Perhaps it will be successful, perhaps it will flop. Who knows until we try!

Kingdom Hearts 2:
Holy marvelous mickey batman! I started playing KH2 over this last weekend and so far after a couple hours of play time I have to say I have been completely sucked in by this series. Square may have been slacking off on the story end of the Final Fantasy franchise, but I would say that KH is picking that slack up and piling on even more awesome. Granted I am only a few hours into the game, but so far the setting is excellent, the mystery is fantastic, and the longing to keep playing even after you should have retired for the night is very high. Its almost like a great book you just can’t put down. (/me makes a mental note to go out and pick up the 358 2 days, and RE: Chain of Memories installments of the series.)

I should also be posting the Cowboy Bebop update soon to the anime guide as well, I just have been too preoccupied to sit and watch the movie myself! All in due time.

For those of you who I speak to regularly you have probably already seen this but for everyone else (yeah I’m talking to you mom woo woo, go audience of one!) I have been participating in an experimental blog/class. The teacher, Ian Schreiber, happens to be a co-author on a recent text book for starting out game design students as well as a former video game programmer and game designer and is now moving into the education world. Long story short, Ian is helping introduce many people into the world and process of game design.

Admittedly, I have to say the class has been really fun, though largely non-digital in essence you can apply the same rules to ditigal games as well. The “homeplays” (aka homework) are challenging and fun, and the feedback on the forums has been excellent (sorry they are private unless you registered for the class otherwise i would post the link). I really feel like I am learning something useful! Another interesting thing, at least personally, is that so far a lot of the concepts behind game design have already been fairly obvious to me as a gamer. What is new to me is the organization behind the process. Normally if I have ever had an idea for a game the process is very cluttered and I tend to mix themes into mechanics and objectives. Ian has helped me essentially to organize my thought process. In fact recently we had to make a board game version of one of our favorite video games, and I feel I had a fairly successful idea with Super Smash Brothers. When I think about making a game now its not “oooo lets have an MMO world, but with Sims like character customization” instead the games are becoming more precisely defined such as: “oooooo let’s make an MMO world where players have the goal of X, Y, and Z. Then build some core concepts of mechanics that allow players to achieve those goals, and lets put it to this kind of theme”.

For anyone who is interested in following along in the blog definitely feel free to do so and even if you are not registered if you feel like participating in the challenges at all feel free to send me an email and I would be more than happy to work with you on them. I am sure that in the future more of my homeplays will appear here as well.

If you look out the window of your vehicle on your way into work today you may notice that there are in fact pigs flying. It all started on Friday the 19th when my wife and I decided to stop by the local AT&T store to check out the iPhone that had recently gone on sale. After about an hour in of some healthy debating, figuring, and some decent salesmanship on the part of the guy helping us, we left the store with an iPhone each and a huge phone bill for next month. It was around this time that we also saw the first delicious piece of bacon flutter off into the great blue yonder. Since then the number of flying mammals has only increased as my attachment the iPhone strengthens.

Here is a short list of reasons why this phone is now the coolest thing in my pocket.
1. A mobile SSH client
2. I now own an mp3 player
3. I pretend to wave a lightsaber around whenever the urge strikes me
5. I can check my email/weather/time of day/schedule/shop on amazon/learn Japanese
6. I can do any of the above anywhere I get cell phone reception on a tiny device that fits comfortably in my pocket.

You may guess that this is my first time owning a phone that has a feature other than just calling people and storing phone numbers, and you would be right. However I think that I held out for the appropriate length of time since the iPhone is now affordable and has basically taken the place of the Dell mini I was hoping to purchase for my new mobile computing needs (sorry Dell). With the added bonus of using cell towers for data if needed, being smaller, and having the same amount of storage… it’s definitely better.

As for the drawbacks, besides the huge cell phone bill we will have every month people are sure to call me an Apple’s consumer bitch… Also my thumbs get sore from playing tap tap revenge 2 for too long.

A new idea has been growing in the back of my mind over the last month or so. Rather than building up to why I think this is a neat project to start I am going to just come right out and tell you what it is, then do that whole justification thingy.

Put simply, I want to start a wiki (in fact it technically already exists) which contains thoughts from my brain imparted directly onto a wiki article.

At first I thought to myself how would this be any different from a blog that I (barely) post in? I think I have managed to create a couple convincing arguments, to put my plan in action. The first and foremost being that wikis really hold no concept of order unless you go about establishing it. This means that I would actually be linking articles together not based on chronology or subject matter but purely on the order in which it falls out of my head and onto the page. In fact there is not even a guarantee that will happen. All I ever will need is my trusty search button regardless of linkage. Granted you can still accomplish this somewhat with a blog but I also feel that the contents of a blog should actually be readable and cohesive. The imagination wiki does not have this constraint. I could create an article about the hostile zombie take over and how it should be converted into a concept for a new MMO (this article is happening), and move quickly on to thoughts of why there are so many species of fish found within the Congo river. Really this is the very nature of a wiki.

Will this actually be useful for me? Only time will tell, but I think that besides providing a memory map it will at least be helpful in reminding me about those ideas I had about penguins, a laptop, and…. something or other, damn you forgetfulness!

Life continues to be busy. However most of that business is self created. I recently resubscribed to WoW, and when I haven’t been playing that I have been watching re-runs of House on USA playing catch up. Hurray for coming into a series late! However one of my recent endeavors involved setting my in-laws up with their new computer… read on if you dare!

I should probably explain that I am an avid user of both Ubuntu and FreeBSD on my home computers. In fact out of the five computers running in my home I have one Windows PC and it exists solely for gaming (<3). I even made my wife switch over to using Ubuntu since she does nothing but browse the web, check her email and chat on instant messenger. She actually enjoys using it by the way. Where does the experiment come in? Ah yes, the in-laws. They for the most part never use their computer for anything except the same tasks my wife does mentioned above. Throw in some word processing and a bit of mp3 listening and viola you have the total sum of computer activities that occur in their household (when I am not there :p).

After replacing a router, failing to get a printer to print and realizing that there was an issue with the rebooting process on the hardware I finally got everything up to my satisfaction… minus the printing. I showed my father in-law around the system, told him how to find basic stuff, left the little help menu on the task bar and made the system resemble XP’s layout as much as I could without doing major changes. He seemed to find it either as adequate and interesting, particularly the multiple desktop feature.

Now the experiment has begun, we are approaching the close of week one of in-law Ubuntu conversion and my phone hasn’t rung once yet with a problem or question. Hopefully they will find it just as useable and if things go well I will plan on converting the entire family! Mwa fwa fwa fwa…

In all seriousness though I think that Linux is particularly a great solution to the basic computer users like my wife or in-laws who share this simple feature set. It is also great to not have to deal with the anti-virus and spyware issue (yes they may exist but its rare to find them). The other added bonus is that remote administration became a hell of a lot more easier for me. I will probably follow up in a couple months just to let everyone (aka the 2 people reading this) know how Linux actually works out for them.

For the last week, plus a little more, I have been working on transitioning Subcreation.net’s forum system to a new software platform. Our old setup was horribly out of date, and not to sound mean (<3 you Alc!), but sadly the source code had been changed so much that I couldn't even find out where original code began and new code ended.... or something like that. However the biggest reason we switched over was because PunBB, which has been a very decent forum for quite a while really just seems to be heading south. They have some great software, but sadly the community has seemingly gone kaput. There are a lot of details behind what has happened there, but the short version goes something like this:

Open source forum software gets bought, continues to be open source, but starts making fundamental changes to the general “concept” of the software because a major original party leaves. Old developers fork the code because they don’t like the new direction.

As such updates are far and few between, both projects really are somewhat interdependent as is apparent on both of the projects boards, and there is a lot of not good feelings that seem to be held at least from the FluxBB side of things (the forked version).

Another big reason for the move is that Subcreation, though it is a small community, has somewhat outgrown the usefulness of PunBB. Instead of being lightweight and minimal, we needed something with a richer feature set. Mainly for features for administrators. This brought us to SMF, or Simple Machines Forums. Which basically holds a lot of logging and other administration abilities that PunBB/FluxBB just lack without heavy modification.

Anywho, so the site has officially transitioned. Though now I am in the process of weeding out kinks from the change over. However I am happy to say that the state the forums are in should be good for a while and will hopefully last us for quite some time.

This is what I see every time I log in to my home box.