Aquarionics

Digi

So, at some point someone is going to have to explain what Digitiser was, and they can’t, because it doesn’t fit into words. Any fool can describe it as “The Teletext Games Pages”, but it sort of evolved from that into this dynamic, character based thing. And that’s character-based in both senses of the word.

Eventually someone from Teletext Management read it, I assume, and saw that it wasn’t totally about games anymore, and it kind of died. It was good though.

It’s also kind of coming back in website form.

It’s creator, Paul ‘Biffo’ Rose (Whose last sighting as BubbleGun just… stopped); as well as Amiga Power god Stuart Campbell and ex-PCGamer Reviews Editor, ex-Cmonster, award winning games journalist and comic writer Kieron Gillen are creating a brand new games website called Digiworld.tv which should be fun.

Actually, it could either be fun or vanish up it’s own arsehole like Digi seemed constantly in danger of doing, but we’ll see.

Be my slave

My first day at the new job was fun, I got keys, a desk (I have drawers!!!) and a computer. We had a long discussion on the Feng Shui of the office, and the effects on said life force of moving said office around, and we had a meeting about the product and it’s direction. Now I have a small pile of (virtual) documentation to read on Monday (Monday is Work From Home Day), which will happen just after I wander down to the Job Centre to give my “I have a job, now bugger off and leave me your money” forms in.

Meanwhile, online I’ve been watching Halflife 2 videos, and Dungeon Siege 2 videos (Both of which are looking very shiny), but this evening I’ve mostly been playing Vampires! The Dark Alleyway, a fun online game thing. Go play! I vant to suck your blood….

Geek & Games

Lack of entries, you may have noticed.

Apologies for that, but I’m a little harrased. Mostly because of the standard First Month Of Job stuff (That I have to pay rent etc. as well as travelling costs from my non-existant cash flow until I get my first pay-check, not at all helped by the Job Centre taking six weeks to process my claim), but also because of general Stuff Happening. Planning stuff for this weekend (where I go camping with AFP), experimenting with anything new in PHP5 that might help me, MySQL4 (Which has just hit this server, so expect an upgrade of the search facility soonish) as well as theorising interfacing stuff like Trackback and PingBack with The Work Project.

On top of this, I’m redesigning. Well, not so much redesigning as designing. I’m making this masterplan to collate my non-aqcom projects to a new server where they can live without cluttering up AqCom’s navigation. This includes Forever and Threadnaut, at least one of which I’ll have to write now that I’ve mentioned it.

Aquaintances has been upgraded to use the latest version of Mark’s feedParser, meaning that if a feed returns a redirection, the config file will be rewritten to the new address. Aquaintances2 is in planning, and will include a simple NNTP server to access it. Epistula’s Gallery module, which has always been the most hackish of everything – mostly because 90% of it was lifted wholesale from the last version with minor tweaks – is suffering an extensive rewrite. If I can do this without breaking URLs I will do, but it looks like some major issues need to be resolved.

I’m also trying to avoid letting my RSI come back. This is so far involving watching Cowboy Bebop and West Wing episodes.

Countering the Anti-RSI activity, I’ve been playing Syberia, a nice return to the traditional adventure format, including actual character development. Sadly, the ending is somewhat annoying, but I expect the forthcoming Syberia 2 to fix that. I’ve also been watching videos of Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest 2 and The Sims 2, all of which look very, very cool.

Mucky feet

One of the best games of 2001 was one you’ve never heard of.

Startopia was a space-station management game in the vein of Theme Park & Theme Hospital, from some of the people behind both those classics.

It was wonderful. It had character, it had grace and style. It was fun to play, and looks good even now in this world full of spinny-rotaty-3d worlds. It didn’t sell because it was released in 2001, and Eidos – who published it – had blown all their budget on Tomb Raider.

It sank. It gathered a series of superlative reviews in the industry press, and then sank without trace. You can – and should – pick it up for a fiver in the local bargain bin.

I mention this because, as of a couple of days ago MuckyFoot, the company who produced that, Urban Chaos, Blade 2, and were halfway through a game for Bulletproof Monk when they finally went under.

As of Friday, 31st October 2003, Muckyfoot are no more.

Best of luck to all of them.

Interplaying around

Interplay, one of the Big Four independant publishers (Others being EA, Ubisoft & Atari. Gathering doesn’t quite make this list yet) recently shut down Black Isle Studios, creators of most of the best CRPGs of the last few years (This was because most of BIS’s most profitable licences – Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale & Planescape – are owned by Atari (Who once were Inforgrames, who cut a special deal for the remains of Hasbro Interactive, who own Wizards of the Coast, who bought TSR, who own the actual D&D Licences. Remember, Capitalism means there’s lots more options in the market-place, and isn’t that neat?).

They were working on Fallout 3, which was – as the others were – a post-nuclear RPG. They were one of the two companies – the other being Bioware – to rebuild the CRPG genre almost from scratch, and it’s really annoying they’ve been let go like this.

On the other hand:

For some reason, there has been a high amount of speculation about Black Isle Studios and intellectual property surrounding the Fallout license. My only guess is that the source of these rumors must be an employee/employees who recently departed Interplay.

[...]

Accordingly, if Interplay management had closed its most valuable development asset or chosen to abandon one of its most prized intellectual assets, the Company would have made an announcement.

As always, Interplay management is focused on delivering great, profitable games and maximum shareholder value.
A letter from Interplay

The killer is that last sentance, I feel. But anyway, the fact that Interplay have laid off the entire staff of BIS doesn’t mean that BIS is gone, oh no. In the same way that Disney laying off all it’s 2D Animators doesn’t mean that they’ve now given up on animation.

Doesn’t mean anything.

Just an awfully strong hint.

Crazy Game

Courtasy of Mr. Gillen comes the Crazy Game, which is a whole 27k.

Your challange is to last… ooh, thirty seconds?

The rules are easy: If it’s moving, it’ll kill you if you hit it.

08:24 – It’s a Windows executable

16:33 – You’ll have to save it as something.exe for it to work properly

Attachments

• Crazy Game
• My High Score (26.544)

Games

Runaway 2 looks good, and will be released
Beneath A Steel Sky 2 looks good, and will be released.
Syberia II looks good, and will be released soon.
“Sam & Max 2” looked wonderful, and won’t be and this is wrong

ScummVM has gone 0.6 for all platforms, and to celebrate they are offering a download of “Flight of the Amazon Queen” and “Beneath a Steel Sky 1” for free. Which is nice.

x², is great. And I’m now going to play it.

Write first time

Workrave is telling me I should stop for the day. I trust it. This should not take long.

RSI back. Sentances shorter. Feel like am in a bad Bridget Jones parody.

Possibly Shatner impersonation.

Learning Python. Have taught python to play Foursquare solitare.

Badly.

Am positive that are better ways of doing things I’m doing. Doing it anyway. Learning Process Considered Nonhalmful.

Recent Things Seen:

(Blinks not working. No idea why. Suspect aliens. Possibly Allens.)

Aquarionics now has its own Amazon ASIN code. Counting days until am in bargain basement.

Fanpants. I’ve no idea what I can say about this.

Real ask Apple to open up AAC DRM because Real are famous for opening up formats and everything.

Freedom Force 2 Diary for great justice.

Am getting tired of sentances fragmented are they. Am going to cast Summon Gramatical Ability, to see what happens.
—
Ahh, better this is. Irritating that structure was getting.
—
Try that again. Right. It’s been an dull week on Planet Aquarion. I’m attempting to make the most of my employment limbo by learning how Python actually works. Despite having written Aquaintances in it, I’ve little to no idea how the language actually works (Aquaintances is very much cargo cult programming, and anyway, I’m no longer using it, I’ve switched to Bloglines instead along with the rest of the known world). This has involved working though Dive into Python and applying the new knowledge gained to solving the problem, which is making FourSquare work.

FourSquare Patience

1. Shuffle normal 1c52 deck.
2. Deal four cards into seperate “play” piles
3. Remove any Kings from the top of any “play” pile.
4. If any cards on the top of any of the play piles add up to 13 (A=1, J=11, Q=12) remove those two cards to the Win pile.
5. If any play piles are empty, deal one card to each empty space and go to step 3.
6. Otherwise, go to step 2.
7. Once you run out of cards to be dealt. Add play piles together, do not shuffle and go to step two.
8. When all cards are in the win deck, you’ve won.

(1c52 == 1 standard deck of 52 cards, meaning no jokers. Contrast with 2c52, 1c104 (Include latin suites), 1c54 etc)

For a patience game, it’s very simple, can be completely automated, but can be made more or less complicated more or less arbitarily. For example, you may want to consider which cards are underneath at step 4, to see if removing this pair rather than that pair will gain you access to that queen which matches that ace.

In short, it’s a nice progamming exercise for learning a language, but the real test is to see how much of the code you can reuse for writing BlackJack further down the line.

And no, I’m not publishing the code for at least another four lessons or so :-D

Also, I’m still playing x², Tropico 2, and – thanks it getting posted back to me – Battlefield 1942 (Actually, mostly Battlefield Pirates) and waiting for my life to get interesting again.

Installing old games

Seven years is not a very long time, really.

Seven years ago a variety of things happened, one of which was the release of a game called “Constructor” for the PC. It was a good – though very hard – build-em-up game, with a host of evil things you could do to the other players, like send hippies in to squat in their empty houses, gangsters to rough up their foremen, ghosts, evil clowns, yobs. It was a nice game.

Well, not a nice game, but a fun game.

I own it. Though various reasons, I in fact own it twice. Once in it’s original CD edition, once in a budget DVD-box edition which I bought a couple of years back. So today I tried to install Constructor.

It took three hours, and still didn’t work right.

The installer for Constructor doesn’t like XP. It says, in fact, that Constructor requires Windows 95 or better. Whether WinXP is better than Win95 is left as an exercise for the reader, but for my purposes it was unhelpful. So, since I’m still on my 30 day trial of VMWare, I set up a Windows 98 virtual machine and installed it on that. So fine, so hoopy.

It didn’t run, though, because VMWare and DirectX don’t play nice, so I copied the install, and all registry settings, from the VM back to the main machine.

No dice.

Discovered the “Run as Windows 95” compatibility option.

Lack of d6.

It was a memory error of some kind. I gave up. Fortunately, Constructor is old enough to be a dual-OS DOS/Win95 game, and so I installed the DOS version under a command line. It installed. It detected my sound-card. It detected everything. It launched…

... No cuboids of any kind.

It refused to run without the CD - that it had just installed from – in the drive. Grr.

Eventually, I got it working under dosbox a Dos emulator designed for Linux and ported to Windows. Because it was emulating DOS, the game – seven years old, remember – barely ran on my 1.6Ghz machine. In fact, dosbox had the same problem as DOS did, in that it didn’t like the CD drive. So I had to find – and download – an abandonware version of Constructor (which – obviously – is hacked to make you able to run it without the CD) and use that.

I’ll repeat that. I’ve just downloaded a pirate version of a game I own because it’s lasted better than the original.

Republics Saved: One. V Good

Observant people might have noticed that Aquarionics was down for most of the time between the last entry and this one. Transfering to CVS didn’t go as smoothly as I planned. Ah well.

I have completed Knights of the Old Republic. I now begin the process of waiting for KotOR II, due out early 2005, annoyingly. I did it as Light Side and finished by getting the girl and beating the bad guy. And boy, was she a tough girl to get too. Bad guy was evil and took me about 20 goes. I had a “list of things that annoy me about KotOR” to post when I finished it, but it’s gone away in favour of the tide of “Bloody hell that’s a good game”, as if the very fact it’s taken up 30 hours of my life in the past few weeks didn’t prove that. Very highly recommended. Go find it, play it, enjoy it.

Star Wars Galaxies - First Impressions

Grr. 2 gig install executable, which expands its bulk over $TEMP and then throws up 1.9 gig of data into the install directory. Total disk space required: 6 gig, in my case across 3 drives. Stupid Sony. And don’t get me started on the 2 gig file that extracts 1.9 gig of installation data, whichever fuckwit decided to bundle DirectX with it needs their heads examined, If I didn’t already have it I could download it myself, it’s not as if the trial doesn’t require the Internet or anything.

14:15 – Have signed into station.com with my ancient EverQuest id, Sony++. Less pleased to discover CD Key registration is sent over HTTP in the clear. Even less pleased to note that I have to spend the next half hour downloading patches. What the fuck? I’ve spent 12 hours downloading this bloody file. This is why I liked the Guild Wars mechanism, you download a 2mb file which auto updates everything, no more tedious bulk-download followed by update-of-all-bulked-files.

14:24 – Okay, reading story arc stuff. It appears that decisions in the game actually matter to the plot, which is quite nice.

16:12 – If you ever get that far. The tutorial is nice, guiding you though the concepts of the interface as you discover all your possessions have been – handily – blown up when people thought you were a terrorist. Second part of the tutorial takes place on a planet (I was on Tatooine – blah – but I just double-clicked the transport device, there may be other options) with an advanced version of the Ultima Online crafting tutorial, which it appears to work roughly the same way as. It’s a lot less flaky than the UO one – you’re given a droid who guides you though the various stages of crafting things. The droid’s pathfinding is pessimal, it frequently is on the opposite side of the world to you, but the instructions are fine.

Having collected enough metal to make a Chemical Finder, I had to find a trainer to train my surveying skill a bit. Trainers are marked on the map, but with their name and title (‘trainer’), which is almost totally useless, since you can’t tell which trainer is the one for your profession. But I digress.

At this point, you see, I logged out. This is because my trainer happened to be in the middle of Mos Eisley, and a more wretched hive of lag and dropped framerates I never hope to again encounter. I’m running this on a Radeon 9700, 1.7g Athlon, 256mb memory, I should not be getting a frame every two seconds, it means going into crowded areas – such as Mos Eisley – is avoided as far as is possible since it’ll take you half an hour to wade though the treacle. I’m aware that this is not exactly nethack, but even with the graphics options turned right down it’s nigh unplayable unless you move the view to top-down so you can’t see anything outside of a 2m radius of your avatar. Either this is an effect of lag – in which case it’s a stunningly bad one, since I can’t move the mouse pointer – or this is just silly. Since the game takes five minutes to shut down, I’m rooting for the latter. Either my other memory stick starts working really soon, or this trial is going to be really sucky.

Postcards

(As promised yesterday)

Too hot to do anything, much, so lack of blogging happens. Sorry.

Actually, there’s a lot I could say, from rants on cargo-cult programming, the weird flaming hoops you have to leap though to get funding in London, and the reasons why my job has achived stablity while the location of my workplace is in a state of flux.

However, unless you have access to (My workblog, accessable only if you’re me or otherwise are inside the BrowserAngel internal network) you can’t know any of that. My aim is that in a few years I’ll be able to declassify the archives and you can see the various bits of hell I subject myself to.

I could go on a rant about the latest “Games are evil” debate, but since it boils down to “It was an 18 rated game, he was 17, he should have been near it”, I haven’t bothered.

Hot town. Summer in the city. It really is like a furnace out there, you step out of air-conditioned coolness into the white heat of a burning sun. London stops, because it’s too hot. Then it rains and the city floods and mean that the next day it takes two hours to get from LKX to Acton.

Then we have the bit where I have to build Rome in three months. Fortunatly, I can redefine Rome.

What else? Oh, Play.com remains evil, causing me to spend money. Actually, I just ended up putting Doom³, Sims 2 and Half-Life² on preorder. So lots of money, but spread out over two months. Which is good, because I have a convention to go to later this month.

I want to shoot people

I want to shoot people.

Sequence of events: Playing Unreal Tournement 2003

• Install Unreal Tournement 2003:
  • Put CD1 in drive.
  • Install
  • Wait.
  • Put CD2 in other drive.
  • Swear
  • Put CD2 in first drive because the installer is foolish.
  • Wait
  • Replace CD2 with CD3
  • Wait
  • Replace CD3 with CD1 (Which is, unlabeled, the “Play” CD)
• Launch Unreal Tournement 2003
• Read MOTD
• Exit Unreal Tournament 2003
• Downloading latest UT2003 Patch:
  • Find latest UT2003 Patch
  • Log into Download site.
  • Find patch again.
  • Wait in queue until it’s my turn on the FTP server
  • Download 12.3 MB patch
  • Install
• Launch UT2003
• Find low ping server.
• Enter server.
• Downloading componants:
  • DM-(GU)Square_Pants_Style.ut2
  • SwitchBinSlayer.u
  • Deez.u
  • ChaosZark101.u
  • CZSnd.uax
  • CZTex.utx
  • CZSM.usx
  • CZAnim.ukx
  • EliteRL.u
  • Relics2k3.u
  • ProZoomInstagibV130.u
  • ShockSniper.u
  • MapVote400b11.u
  • LRfRL.u
• Lost connection to server (They aren’t on that map anymore)
• Enter server again.
• Downloading componants:
  • DM-Cistern11.ut2
  • cp_Junkyard.utx
  • SG_LO_meshes.usx
  • SG_Lost_Outpost.utx
  • AW-Cubes.utx
  • AW-Junk.usx
  • AW-Metals.utx
  • jm-prefabs.utx
  • cp_Evilmetal.utx
  • AW-Shaders.utx
  • WarFx.utx
  • cp_Evil3.utx
  • cp_cubemaps.utx
  • cp_fx.utx
  • SC-City.utx
  • CP_UT2K3_TechSetMesh1.usx
• Lost connection to server
• New server
  • SniperArena.u
  • BonusPack.u
  • MutantSkins.utx
  • Server refuses to send “AnnouncerEvil”
  • http://www.google.com/search?q=AnnouncerEvil
  • Is part of Epic Bonus Pack.
• Quit UT2003
  • Log into Download site.
  • Find Epic Bonus Pack.
  • Wait in queue until it’s my turn on the FTP server
  • 17:08 Download 149.64 MB pack
  • 18:11 Install Epic Bonus Pack.
• 18:11 – 19:00: BOOM BAM OUCH eek ARGH bang BOOM

Doomed

I now have Doom³

BBL.

Bring me that horizon

In brief then:

• Am back from con. It was fun. Report later.
• UK Media is back in “Qualifications” peanut-galleryery. Report later.
• Doom 3 Rocks. Report later.
• Sid Meier’s Pirates remake looks like it will rock. Report later.
• Sims 2 has gone gold, and is on target for September release. Report later.

Non-harmful

Shaun of the Dead is really good.

Other things under construction:

• Review of Locomotion
• State of the Education System
• The Sands Conspiracy
• Oxford Tweed and the Lawn Chairs of Doom

Also:

It should be noted, to start with, that Stave was not chasing after multiple-centries old bottles of port because he had nothing else to do. Far from it, its just it was a conveniant way to keep out from under the feet of the several hundred groups who were currently trying to kill him.

Founding of the City of Heroes

18:15 – Get home from work to find COH sitting on the Kitchen counter. If I’d known it was here, I’d have skipped out of work early…

18:30 – Having convinced my computer that the second hard drive really is a formatted disk, manage to install COH. Really, really wish developers would stop playing music during installs, or at the very least let me turn it off, as it clashes with the Divine Comedy something chronic. Launch game.

So, it looks like Crypic Studios have been busy, over 200mb of updates. Woo, yay. Cook dinner while waiting.

19:15 – That was quick (updates that is) launch game. Am asked for Username and Password. Since I already have a PlayNC account from the CoH forums, type that in.
“Incorrect Username/Password”
retype.
And again.
Try with alternate password.
Log in to website sucessfully, and realise that “Incorrect Username/Password” really means “You haven’t registered this game yet”. Register game.
Give site credit card details for free month (sigh).
Am told to await registration email
Go to eat dinner.

19:53 – Still waiting.

19:55 – Tried to login with the details, and it worked.

22:27 – I return. For three hours, I was playing City of Heroes as “The Raynebow”. Raynebow is… From his description:

After a terrible accident invoving a Magic wand and a box of Crayola, Trent Rayne’s life changed forever. Now he defends Paragon City as… The Raynebow!

Spending my time currently wandering though the missions, fighting muggers (and getting killed, annoyingly, when I’m overrun) and hitting people with a whacking great sword made of ice. Leaping small buildings in a single bound! Watching the flying superheroes above me, and patiently waiting my turn! Fighting for truth! Justice! and the next level up!

I think I’m going to enjoy playing this game rather a lot…

We lied to you, too

Open letter from the Computer industry to the Entertainment industry

Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less

This part, if no other part of that manifesto, is bollocks.

This month I’ve bought five new games (It’s been something of a bad month for my self control). Of these, four of them have had sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys that I have to type in, three wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive, and one had a prerequisite of two other games (It was the final NeverWinter Nights expansion pack) which also required sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys, and one required signing up on a website also.

All in the name of “Copy Protection”.

In fact, I could bypass all this copy protection by downloading the games from Kazaa or eDonkey or something, because the first thing the Pirates do is remove all the copy protection. So it’s not the people who download the games who end up feeling like they’re being treated like criminals. It’s us, the people who buy the fricken games for £30 a pop.

The only game that didn’t have any kind of copy protection – no magic drivers, hidden sectors, no CD-Keys, no Web registration – was also one of the ones that wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive.

Since it was a 1950s era Monopoly set.

It’s got wooden buildings and everything, it rocks.

Blackberries

This week has seen a surfeit of blackberries in my life.

There is a blackberry bush that runs the entire length of the field near Casarufus, and the branches are currently heavy with ripe blackberries, waiting patiently for us to pick them. So we did.

Thus we have had blackberry and apple crumble (Yum, and far better than the last crumble I helped make ); blackberry, mango & banana smoothies (I bought a blender. Now we blend); Blackberry and apple pie (Both the blackberry and apple things were LoneCat), Blackberry sauce for ice cream (also nice) and more variations on uses for fresh blackberries than you could shake a bramble at. And we’ve still got more blackberries.

In other news, I bought The Sims last week. This is part of the reason why I’ve been somewhat lax in updating (Also because I have City of Heroes, Locomotion, Neverwinter Nights, Shaun of the Dead, Futurama, A project due in two weeks and a cold). You’ll be hearing all about my sims in due course, I expect, although it’s annoying that they took out the “Family web-page” feature, although I think I was the only person ever to use it to attempt to create FOAF profiles for my sims…