| Friday, February 10, 2006 |
 Enough to show off | 
Posted - 2/10/2006 5:50:36 PM | Eh, what the heck. I got enough done with the game (new title "ConFusebox") to show off. It properly generates and scrambles the puzzle, and you can rotate the pieces around. It doesn't yet keep score or detect whether or not you've won, but that's not too difficult.
http://www.thecodezone.com/delme/confusebox.html
I won't post rules, as it's pretty easy to figure out. Turn on all of the lights. The square with the lightning bolt is the power source.
This is a 12x12 puzzle. I can make 'em pretty-much any size I want, but 12x12 is probably as big as I wanna make it. Any bigger and it takes too long to generate and solve. I want this to be a quick game.
And yes you currently get the same puzzle every time. Being able to generate the same puzzle from a daily seed is one of the requirements.
Enjoy and post comments!
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| Thursday, February 9, 2006 |
| New game is apace | |
Posted - 2/9/2006 7:05:10 PM | The next daily puzzle is thought up and is about half-developed, which is to say that I'm now generating a puzzle, but there's not yet a way to solve it.
It's nothing you haven't seen before.
Actually it might be something you haven't seen before. It was one of the reasons to purchase a Cybiko and was a fun little game, but it never seemed to catch on elsewhere. Ernie has a hexagonal version that's lots of fun, but there must be a daily puzzle version.
I'll see how far I get. I'll keep you posted.
Come to think of it, the Cybiko had a couple of great puzzles that would be perfect for the daily puzzle format. I'm starting to get bummed that I sold mine off.
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| Wednesday, February 8, 2006 |
| Yay, it's working | |
Posted - 2/8/2006 12:12:34 PM | The Voracity high score board is now playing back the top scores, so if you wanna see how the top folks did, you can play back their solution. I originally just had the game playing back the top solution, but I changed it to the top three, mainly so that you wouldn't get the impression that Bob/T2K's Voracity-bot is applying any kind of strategy that you can duplicate :)
There was a hiccup in saving solutions for ChessCards, but that's working now too, so you'll be able to see solutions starting tomorrow. Hopefully being able to play back CC solutions will make the rules a tad more obvious.
Enjoy the games and keep playing!
On to making new games. I think these are about how I want 'em to be.
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| Tuesday, February 7, 2006 |
| Two good things for five bucks | |
Posted - 2/7/2006 1:35:56 PM | First is phpFlashMyAdmin. If you're using MySQL, you're probably using phpMyAdmin to manage your database. It's a great tool and it does make the job of managing your database way easier than via an SQL command-line, but it's based entirely in HTML forms. This makes the whole experience clunky to say the least. phpFlashMyAdmin has all of the same back-end as phpMyAdmin, but instead of an HTML form front-end, it has an interface built entirely in Flash.
And it works great. It's not quite as snappy and luxurious as using a native EXE front-end to your database, like MS Access, but it's about as close as you're gonna get in a web browser.
And it's five bucks. Worth every penny.
The next is "Banquet Crock-Pot Classics". These are frozen meals that you make in a crock-pot, and they're great if you don't wanna spend a lot of time cooking. Basically you toss most of the ingredients in a crock-pot, set it on "low", then return eight hours later to drop anything in that's not slow-cooker friendly (like rice or noodles). Then a half-hour later, you're done. The $5 package makes three big servings, and it requires a total of about five minutes of actual prep-time. Good if you want something that tastes better than a TV dinner but has the same commitment. Best is the Chicken & Rice. Worst is the Pork & Potatoes (mostly due to the potatoes being mealy).
I'm always looking ways to eat cheap without working my ass off, and this is a good one.
And I have nothing more to say, so here's a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with a bomb on his head. Pastafarians will likely be burning my house down soon.
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| Some minor changes. | |
Posted - 2/6/2006 6:23:34 PM | If it seems like I'm spending a lot of time tuning a rather trivial game, it's because I am. I'm trying to get every feature that I want into Voracity so that when I make future daily puzzles the groundwork will already be done.
That being said, I have the playback stuff working now!
Unfortunately, playing back a solution requires me to actually RECORD a solution and store it in the database. And the Voracity applet didn't store recorded solutions until about an hour ago.
So, if you haven't played the game yet, point your browser over to http://www.thecodezone.com/games/voracity.php and play today's puzzle.
If you look down at the high-scores table, you'll see that it now has a little playback applet for the top score. As soon as top scores start appearing that have recorded solutions (in a couple of days at most), you'll be able to play back the top solution in the table.
This is pretty-much the last feature that I wanted to add. I'll work a similar player into ChessCards, and then I'll start on new puzzles. I have a couple in mind.
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| Saturday, February 4, 2006 |
| C'mon Rick, you knew I had to talk about it. | |
Posted - 2/4/2006 10:05:53 AM | Yesterday was "Date Night" at Clariden. That's a once-a-month affair when the school babysits the kids so parents can have kid-free time. Maggie thinks that Date Night is the greatest thing that ever happened, as all of the kids get to put on their jammies, eat pizza, play ball in the gym, and watch movies together. It's a bigass late-night party for her, so everybody wins.
We got together with pals Rick and Terri at Cowtown Sushi for Rick's 39th birthday dinner. We got a couple of their ginormous "Sushi Boat For Two" specials and a buncha Kirin Ichibans and generally had a good time.
We still had a little time left on the babysitting-meter, so we headed over to Barnes & Noble, as we couldn't think of a nearby place that (a) served beer and (b) had loads of old-school 80's arcade games. On the way to B&N;, Rick and I talked a bit about my new games, as he's a fan and has been passing around the URLs to his pals.
I mentioned that a user ID that was clearly Rick's made a fairly abysmal score at ChessCards on Thursday. Taking a peek at Friday's entries, I noticed that someone who was probably him made a similarly miserable score the next day (500+ moves and 25+ minutes to complete). He remarked that he couldn't understand how anyone could possibly solve the puzzle with the other scores people were posting. The rest of the conversation went like this:
Rick: Well, I try to be systematic about getting the cards in place. First I place all of the twos, then all of the threes, then. . .
Me: Waitwaitwait. Are you putting the cards in numerical order?!
Rick: Yeah.
I then explained that the object of the game was to just put the suits into rows, not to put the cards into numerical order. He admitted that that does make the game a tad simpler.
I'll probably make this clearer in the rules. Not that it'd matter.
BTW, big thanks on the feedback (from the folks who gave me feedback). Most of the bug reports have been tuning-type stuff. I'd like to get these nice and solid before I start out on more daily puzzles. Having had to deal with multi-game packs in the past, it's much easier to solve all your problems at code-time then to have to work a fix into a dozen games.
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| Thursday, February 2, 2006 |
| Yep, I'm moving things already | |
Posted - 2/2/2006 3:35:05 PM | Shelly made the astute observation that the front page at www.thecodezone.com doesn't do a goldurned thing except announce stuff that you're better off reading on the blog page. So I had two choices. . .
1. Put up a pointless piece of animated flashturbation to fill the space and make it look like intentional emptiness.
2. Put some actual freakin' content on the front page.
Shelly had no idea why I'd tuck away the links to the games on a separate page, so I eliminated the games page and put the links to the games on the front page. I also put together a couple of silly animated buttons for the games so it wouldn't just be dull text-links.
The upshot of all of this is that the link I gave you yesterday for the games no longer works. If you wanna play the new games, go right to the main page at www.thecodezone.com and the links will be unmistakable.
Another thing Shelly mentioned that I need is to give the top player his props by showing off his solution to the puzzle. That means that I'll likely be making a miniature "playback" applet for each game. It'll look like the puzzle, but it'll be noninteractive apart from a "play" button that'll play back the winning solution. I'll also need to start recording your solution as you play it and storing that in the database too, so I can pass that along to the playback app.
Or I can just write more daily puzzles. What would you prefer?
Oh, and another thing that deserves mention. It's PHPObject from Ghostwire Studios. It's a very simple (and free) chunk of PHP code that simplifies function-calling between client-side Flash and server-side PHP. There are at least a dozen good Flash-server solutions out there, but they were all overkill for my needs. PHPObject is as simple as possible and solved all of my problems.
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| Wednesday, February 1, 2006 |
| The trigger is officially pulled | |
Posted - 2/1/2006 4:49:48 PM | Okay, the protection stuff went a tad faster than expected, and I was able to pull together a second daily puzzle in a hurry (actually, the game was already written. It was just a matter of shoe-horning the update stuff into it).
The upshot is that for the first time in who-knows-how-long, you can actually play games on thecodezone.com again!
So, point your browser to http://www.thecodezone.com/games.html and try 'em out now! There's nothing to download and nothing that will futz with your machine. It's just little puzzles that you can play in your browser.
Try 'em out and post feedback. Good, bad, or whatever.
On to some bizness. My links to the actually game pages are about as boring as. . .well. . .some sort of boring thing. I want some cool looking buttons or icons or such that'll compel people to go to the page and play the game. Any thoughts?
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| almost there | |
Posted - 2/1/2006 12:04:56 PM | Well, I actually planned to unveil my first online puzzle on thecodezone.com yesterday.
As bad fortune had it, though, I found out that Verizon's byzantine labyrinthine billing system had just discovered that while I do have fiberoptic internet coming to the house, I do not have any phone numbers associated with it, as I moved the phone and fax line over to Vonage.
So Verizon did the smart thing. Since your "customer number" is the same as your phone number and I don't have a phone number with 'em, they deleted the account. So it took an hour of Shelly wrangling with Verizon and eight hours of "your internet should be back up within two hours", we had internet and phone back up.
Kudos to Vonage for their new service that rolls over calls to another phone number if your Vonage box is unreachable. We had it set to roll over calls to Shelly's cell-phone, and we didn't miss any calls.
While the internet was down, I took advantage of the time to make a couple of changes to the protection scheme. It's notoriously easy to "steal" Flash applets from someone's server, but there are a few things you can do to at least prevent casual theft. One thing that's common is to put a text file on your server that looks like this:
magicPassword=abracadabra
While your applet loads, it grabs that text file off your server, checks the value, and runs only if it's what you expect (i.e. "abracadabra"). Since a Flash applet (like a Java applet) can only talk to the server that created it, putting the applet on another server will make the applet refuse to run.
Just because I could, I went a step further. Rather than a text file, I check a PHP "magicPassword" file. When I want to grab the file from the server, I pass it a random string of digits. The file then returns that string, after encrypting it a bit. My applet then decrypts that string, compares it to the original, and runs if they match.
That's step four of the protection. . .
Step one is that the HTML "unframes" itself if it sees that some other site has it in a frame.
Step two is that the applet itself re-launches its surrounding page if it sees that its surrounding HTML isn't coming from thecodezone.com (i.e. someone tries to embed the applet on their page without copying it from my server).
Step three is that the applet is encrypted. Many Flash people poo-pooh Flash obfuscators, but I haven't found a commercial decompiler yet that can get reasonable code from it.
Far as I can tell, these four steps are about the limit of Flash applet protection right now. The only reasonable way to run my game on another site right now is to decompile the applet and remove the protection from the obfuscated code. And, frankly, if you're willing to work that hard for some little puzzle games, you're better off just writing 'em from scratch :)
The upshot is that I'm about a day away from unveiling the ChessCards Daily Puzzle. I do look forward to you seeing it.
The way the game works is that you're presented with a daily puzzle. Everybody gets the same puzzle. You have to slide cards around until you solve the puzzle. Once you solve the puzzle, you enter your name. The next day you can check back to see how well you did. . .and play the next day's puzzle.
ChessCards isn't an ideal puzzle for the daily puzzle format, because I find that each puzzle takes 10-15 minutes to solve. I plan to introduce a couple more similar games in the coming two weeks that are much faster (1-2 minutes).
It's almost there. I promise!
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| Thursday, January 26, 2006 |
| mannerisms and such | |
Posted - 1/26/2006 4:37:48 PM | Unlike many people I know who participate in online discussion forums, I really don't have an "online persona". The way I conduct myself online is, for better or worse, exactly like I act in real life. Anyone attending the GDC with me can certainly attest to that.
And this does extend to my speech mannerisms, along with overuse of appositives, deathly fear of ending sentences with prepositions, and use of obsolete phrases like "my ownself", probably inspired by too many readings of Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, and Lil' Abner.
What this is leading up to (up to which this is leading) is that I'm apparently rubbing off on my daughter, who'll be four next month. On our way home from school yesterday, I asked her how her day went.
Her reply was "Oh, we had snacks and played and such".
It sounds even better when spoken with the thick Texas drawl that she's developing. By the time she's 18, she's going to sound like the female Hal Holbrook :)
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| Tuesday, January 24, 2006 |
| Screenweaver = good | |
Posted - 1/24/2006 12:52:04 PM | I'm still doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the site, preparing it for selling games. One thing I decided that I need is some more "come on" freebie-type items to drive traffic to the site.
One thing that Flash is born to do is screen savers. Screen savers and Flash should be a match made in heaven. Problem is that the SCR format is pretty restrictive. It's basically a standalone EXE that gets passed information about how to display itself, show its settings, and respond to Windows messages when it's time to die (i.e. when the user moves the mouse). Flash doesn't handle that.
Fortunately, most Flash EXE-builders can build screensavers that handle all of that stuff for you. I've been using Zinc for EXE-building, but its screensaver support is pretty mediocre. The only real option you have is to add a bitmap that'll display as your screensaver settings. I wanted the ability to change the settings of a screensaver, and it appeared that Zinc just wouldn't do it.
Enter Screenweaver. Screenweaver is a similar Flash EXE-builder. Right now it's very much in a state of flux. After a couple of years without an update, the author decided to open-source the whole thing. It's had a couple of minor updates since then, but most work has been devoted to a version 4 that's on the horizon.
Screenweaver's screensaver support, however, is top-notch. I can set one Flash file for the screensaver and one for the setup screen. I made a tiny little Flash file with buttons and saves settings out to the registry. The screensaver can then read those values and everything's happy.
It's not perfect. For one thing, I have to restart the Screenweaver build environment every time I want to build my SCR, as it gets lost after a couple of builds.
So I'm happy. I'm making a couple of screensavers. If there's any suggestions for a screensaver you'd like to see, lemme know.
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| My favorite browser | |
Posted - 1/23/2006 4:36:58 PM | Okay, I'm now officially happy with my browser. One thing I like about my Firefox setup is that everything's shoved up near the top, so I get as much stuff as possible on the screen. Here's my browser-top:
It's a bit squished, but everything I like is there. Gamedev gets its own button because I camp there a lot. The buttons on the far right are for Google Toolbar's spell-checker and form-filler, both of which fill me with much love.
Only problem is that it's Firefox, and there are a couple of sites that Firefox just doesn't like, specifically ActiveX-requiring sites like Microsoft Update and Popcap Games. Normally I'd launch IE for those sites, but I just got the updated IE Tab that makes that unnecessary. IE Tab has been around for a bit, but it's completely seamless now.
What it does is replace Firefox's page-rendering engine with IE's for sites you specify. If I, for example, wanna check for Windows updates or play a game of Chuzzle, I can just launch the bookmark in Firefox and those pages will work because they're actually being secretly rendered with IE in Firefox's client space. Apart from a little IE icon in the address bar, you wouldn't even know it's doing that.
I'm only saying this because I tried out the new IE7 beta. While the page rendering looks good and is fast and fixes old problems of the past (like PNG display), the new toolbars and address bars and tab-bars take up way too much space, and there's not a good way to combine things into one space-saving bar (see above). With this little combo, though, I now get the best of all worlds --the toolbar and tabs the way I like, and the ability to browse any danged site I want without having to switch browsers from time to time.
IIRC, this was an early plan for IE. They were planning to bust the whole thing up into modules rather than one monolithic rendering engine, plugin-izing every piece that's rendered. If someone added a new sub-format to PNG, for example, adding support to the browser's rendering engine would be as simple as replacing the PNG plugin rather than waiting for an update to the rendering engine.
I think that was also the plan for Apple's "Cyberdog".
Of course, that didn't happen. MS stuck with the monolithic rendering engine, the other browser companies kept that model as well, and Cyberdog was abandoned about eight seconds after it was released.
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| John = amused | |
Posted - 1/22/2006 7:35:46 AM | Was just surfing Google Video, the biggest time-sponge in the universe next to Google Earth. I won't post a list. I'll just post the one video that amused me the most.
Exceedingly stupid dog.
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| Thursday, January 19, 2006 |
| Outstanding game deal | |
Posted - 1/19/2006 9:39:41 AM | Here's an unbeatable deal, especially if you have kids. It's one of those "Dance Dance Revolution" games, complete with dance pad, for ten bucks.
Step one: Go to the Kraft web site and order the Kraft dance pad ($9.95 shipped). It's a full size dance pad, similar to the ones you've seen in game stores.
Step two: Get StepMania. This is an open source "Dance Dance Revolution" knockoff. It has loads of downloadable visuals and songs and such. It's really a top-notch piece of software.
That's it. The Kraft pad is intended to be used with Shockwave dance games on the Kraft website, but Windows thinks it's a standard USB joystick, so it'll work with pretty-much anything. I verified this myself (I'm the "John" mentioned on the StepMania website).
It's a standard USB joystick, so I presume it'll also work with the OSX or Linux version. I can't verify that, though.
Have fun!
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| Wednesday, January 18, 2006 |
| Open packaging question for the readers | |
Posted - 1/18/2006 1:06:12 PM | Just a question about software packaging, specifically for mailed products. How important is packaging to you if I was to mail you a CD?
For example, let's take four scenarios for a piece of software that I mail to you.
1. Full color CD in DVD-style clamshell case with full-color insert with screenshots on the back. two-page mini-manual inside, shipped in a fitted cardboard mailer. Total cost:
Media (inkjet printable CD-R) - $0.25
DVD Case - $0.29
Insert and mini-manual printing - $0.25
Cardboard DVD Mailer - $0.43
Postage - $1.50 (first class or media mail)
Total cost: $2.72
2. Full color printed CD in plastic jewel case with full-color square insert. Setup instructions printed on the jewel case insert or CD. Mailed in a small cardboard jewel-case box. Total cost:
Media (inkjet printable CD-R) - $0.25
CD Jewel Case - $0.24
Insert printing - $0.10
Cardboard mailer - $0.26
Postage - $1.25 (first class)
Total cost: $2.10
3. Full color printed CD packed and mailed in a scratch-resistant cardboard mailer Installation instructions printed on the CD.
Media (inkjet printable CD-R) - $0.25
Mailer - $0.59
Postage - $0.60 (first class)
Total cost: $1.44
4. Full color printed CD packed and mailed in folded orgami CD case printed on stiff paper. Installation instructions printed on the paper and/or the CD.
Media (inkjet printable CD-R) - $0.25
Insert printing (stiff paper) - $0.15
Postage - $0.60 (first class)
Total cost: $1.00
The question is, how important would it be for you to receive the "deluxe" packaging over the no-frills one? Would you be willing to take no-frills packaging if you could save $1 or $2 on the product?
Or, as an alternate question, what price-point would you expect to pay for the above items? For example, would you feel ripped off if you paid $20 for packaging choice 3 or 4? How about if you paid $5? At what price-point would you expect to get each packaging choice?
I'll start the discussion by posting my own worthless opinion first. Respond with your own worthless opions.
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| Movie night | |
Posted - 1/15/2006 8:43:21 PM | Saw "Brokeback Mountain" this weekend. It was pretty good.
It rather reminded me of "Last Picture Show" in its treatment of conventional-yet-loveless relationships. Also the sets and pacing were similar. Fairly slow, but rewarding.
The sex stuff wasn't as bad as I'd heard. If you've ever sat through five minutes of "Queer As Folk", you've seen worse.
Edit: Just found out that "Brokeback Mountain" and "Last Picture Show" were both written by Larry McMurtry.
Dang I'm insightful.
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| Thursday, January 12, 2006 |
| RIP CUJ | |
Posted - 1/12/2006 5:15:16 PM | There was a sticker on the cover of my latest issue of C/C++ User's Journal telling me that this issue (February I think) is the last and that the remainder of my (free) subscription will be paid out in issues of Dr. Dobbs Journal. Given that P.J. Plauger's editorial made no mention of it, I presume that it wasn't a decision that was long in the making.
Honestly I don't think it's as much a commentary on the state of C++ as it is a commentary on the state of print magazines. PC Magazine and Computer Shopper are both at well under 100 pages, down from their great phone-book bulk of years past. I stopped renewing all of my subscriptions. The only computer magazines I still get are Game Developer (because it's free) and Dr. Dobb's Journal (because I've got another 3 years outstanding on it from other magazines that have similarly imploded).
IMHO, we're just out of the era of the computer magazine. Honestly, I don't read 'em anymore unless I'm in a place where a computer's just not convenient (long car trip, airplane, etc).
G'bye C/C++ User's Journal. You'll live on forever on my hard drive as a big pile of digital editions that I prefer to the paper version anyway because I can search 'em via Google Desktop Search.
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| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
| Weird | |
Posted - 1/11/2006 1:59:32 PM | This is interesting.
A year ago, a dual 2 Ghz PowerPC processor machine was half again as fast as a dual 3.6 Ghz Intel machine.
But now a single 2.1 Ghz PowerPC processor machine is half the speed of a dual 2 Ghz Intel machine.
Assuming that two processors offer a 20% speed increase over one and that a 3.6 Ghz pentium processor is twice as fast a 2.0 Ghz pentium processor (ref Tom's Hardware), it appears that CPU benchmarks run almost four times faster under OSX than under XP.
Either that or someone's cooking the books. Apple really ought to take down that first page.
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| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 |
| I gots perks | |
Posted - 1/10/2006 12:15:16 PM | One nice perk about being an ASP member is that ASP members like to give perks to fellow ASP members. There are loads of shareware utilities and games and stuff that are available free or at pretty steep discounts for ASP members.
Thus far I only took advantage of the 100% discount for PromptPal, which is a pretty cool enhancement for the old Windows command prompt. Nicest thing is that it's a 2-pane sort of affair, and when you type in a command like "dir", it automatically pops up all of the command-line options.
It also dispenses with the ridiculous "different from everything else in Windows" method of mark-copy-paste that you need to do if you want to move any text to and from the command prompt.
I'll probably share the wealth, with a steep member-discount for Duck Tiles.
Oh, and this comic cracked me up.
Just thought I'd share the wealth.
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| Saturday, January 7, 2006 |
| Google disappoints again | |
Posted - 1/7/2006 10:23:14 AM | First it was "Google Office" which ended up being "Java VM setup will have a checkbox to install Google toolbar".
Now it's the "Google Computer" which ended up being "Google will zip Firefox, Acrobat Reader, and Norton Antivirus together".
Here's the Google rumor equation. . .
(Google announcement rumor) * 0.000005 = Google announcement reality
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| Screen sizes | |
Posted - 1/6/2006 3:47:28 PM | Working on making my stuff size nicely for monitors now. Up until yesterday, the client area of the game was about 760x520 pixels. That way the game would be playable on an 800x600 machine (allowing for title bars etc). Problem is, I also wanted the user to have a full-screen option. To do full-screen, I had two options:
1. Resize the window and stretch everything in it to fit the larger window.
2. Change the machine's resolution and don't stretch.
Option 1 is usually preferred in a Flash app (given that everything's vector and resizes with almost no performance hit), and it looks quite nice that way. Problem is that I have a lot of bitmaps in my app, and Flash needs to stretch 'em on-the-fly. Performance dropped a little on my machine, but I imagine it would drop a lot on a lower-end machine, so I decided to change the monitor resolution directX-style and leave the game at its current size.
That, however, was a problem too. If I drop the machine resolution and center the game, I end up with a big border of empty around it (given the aforementioned slightly-smaller-than-800x600 size I was using). And it really looked ugly after changing machine resolution. Making the client window 800x600 would fix that, but that'd make the game unplayable on an 800x600 screen as anything but full-screen.
So I implemented two checkboxes in the setup. One is called "smaller screen", and it shrinks the client area to 640x480 so it's playable on an 800x600 screen. This does cause the aforementioned problem of bitmap stretching, but since you're stretching things smaller rather than bigger, the performance hit isn't as bad.
When the game runs the first time, it checks the monitor's current resolution, if it's 800x600 or lower, "smaller screen" is selected by default. For everyone else, it's really not necessary (unless you just want the game to be smaller).
The other checkbox is called "full screen", and it kicks the monitor into 800x600, kills off the title bar, and centers the game. Thus you're full-screen without the performance hit of stretching.
Thus is the world of the discount rack --don't assume that your game's players will have as nice a screen as you do.
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| Thursday, January 5, 2006 |
| All tempa-Cheer, now with BRAND AWARENESS! | |
Posted - 1/5/2006 10:04:33 AM | Way back when in the early days of microcomputers, there was the computer convention. Often given whimsical names and devoted to a single platform (Apple, TRS-80, etc), these computer fests were the grass roots. Little garage software and peripheral companies abounded, selling all kinds of programs and doodads to improve your new (and at the time not all that useful) home computer. You could just ping-pong from table to table checking out new offerings. If you saw something cool, you could whip out your checkbook and it's yours. It was a combination convention, geek meet-n-greet, and swap meet. Ahh the days.
Fast forward to today. While there are still some small players, often revolving around the same anemic home computers of 1981, computer conventions have grown quite a bit. At least in the heady heyday of the now-deceased Comdex, they could out-glitz Las Vegas (which is not an easy thing to do).
But something is gone.
It's the tables with stuff! The days of Big Bob Software selling stacks of BobWord 1.0 for the TRS-80 are gone. He's been replaced with multi-hundred-thousand dollar booths from Sony and Intel selling. . .NOTHING! If I walk into the Intel booth and tell 'em that I've heard about their company and that I'm interested in developing software for their new CISC microprocessor (remember when they were called that?) the best I'll get is a colorful brochure, a keychain, and a promise to contact me (which they never do).
What's the freakin' point? Honestly, if I was a developer interested in developing for an Intel processor, I could order everything I need from their website or their 800-number. Apart from a five-minute demo of their latest profiler suite (probably downloadable as a QuickTime file on their website), there's exactly zilch that their expensive booth has to offer.
If I walked up to the 3D Studio Max booth, watched the demo, and then said "that looks like a great product, I'll take it!", they'd give me a look like a german shepherd trying to understand calculus. After all, they don't actually want you to buy 3D Studio Max, they just want you to become aware of it, then take a colorful brochure and walk away.
And that's just pointless.
Other kinds of conventions haven't caught this bug. Imagine if you went to a comic book convention, and you went to the booth for Big Bob's comics. After shaking hands with Big Bob, you ask him what he's selling. He then goes into a pitch for his new comic, "Lightning Man". He describes the superhero's origins and adventures, punctuated with slides showing really nice superhero art. You then say "sounds like a good read, gimme one", and Big Bob says "No, we're not actually selling Lightning Man comics. We just want you to be aware of the Lightning Man brand".
Having gone to both conventions, I can confirm that the learning-calculus gaze would then be happening on the other side of the velcro-draped table.
I just don't get it anymore. While it's certainly fun to see the colored lights and collect free rubber toys from booths, the whole experience has just melted together into one big dull continuum of people selling you the fact that they're selling something. I wanna see a real game development expo. One where I see a booth for Big Bob's 3D Engine, I talk to Bob a bit about his engine, I'm impressed with it, I pay him $x.xx for it, and he hands me a CD and a manual.
At least that's something. As opposed to brand awareness, which is nothing.
And since I have nothing more to say, here's a picture of a rabbit with a pancake. . .I mean Murray the killer armadillo trying to burrow under our fence. Mel decided that Murray doesn't really fight back, so he's gotten more bold about chasing him around the yard. And, since I cut off the biggest escape route from the back yard (the drainage ditch outlet) to keep puppies from escaping, Murray has to find his own way out.
What an odd brain a creature must have to have its fight-or-flight reflex tell him "I am threatened, I must DIG!"
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| Wednesday, January 4, 2006 |
| More commerce suchlike | |
Posted - 1/4/2006 5:59:35 PM | Almost everything's working. I'm down (no pun intended) to the download manager. Looks like I need to use the HTTP_Download class in PHP, which is part of PEAR, which is a collection of useful stuff for PHP.
And I can't find the goldurned thing on my server. Looking at the PHP config on my site, it appears that PEAR is installed, but I don't for the life of me know where the include directory for it is.
So I've got a tech support message out to the monkeys at my ISP. Hopefully I can get the rest of this thing hacked together soon.
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| Oooh, the new year opens with much shininess | |
Posted - 1/3/2006 11:54:35 AM | Happy new 2006 and such.
Looks like there's about to be a new entry in the continuing PDA-made-game-machine wars. This one's verrrry pretty and can be seen here.
Unfortunately, while putting a PDA OS on a game handheld sounds good in theory, it's been a cavalcade of failure in practice, witness the Tapwave Zodiac, Gizmondo, and N-Gage (although the N-Gage was really more of a cellphone OS than PDA OS, but I digress). They all tried to make game machines out of PDA's, and they all failed pretty miserably.
Ditto for the GP32, which is also very sexy and very developer-friendly but didn't even get a US release.
And this is odd, because developers should be praising these machines up to the sky. They're all cheap to develop for (Zodiac=Gnu C++, Gizmondo=free MS C++, N-Gage=free J2ME or Gnu C++, GP32=Gnu C++) and have no content restrictions or content-police at all. Zodiac and Gizmodo are also both double as quite capable PDA's (running Palm and Windows Mobile, respectively).
Of course, they all had their own problems (Zodiac=expensive for what you got, Gizmondo=huge ugly "do everything" form factor, N-Gage=mediocre phone, GP32=nobody knows it exists), so that's keeping 'em away.
Meanwhile the PSP is getting all of the press and all of the developers despite the fact that it's content-policed out the wazoo! Everybody gets excited when there's a new PSP firmware update that's got enough of a security hole to let you run something other than what Sony wants you to run, ignoring the fact that any of those other game handhelds will allow you to develop and/or run any goldurned thing you want!
Ditto for the new gameboy. Yeah, you can develop for it. Just don't plan to make any money on what you develop unless you can make Nintendo smile.
Who knows. Maybe this little gizmo is the one that'll get a following. One thing I liked about the Cybiko was the little game delivery service that they put together. The Cybiko was way too anemic hardware-wise to compete against the Gameboy Advance, but its game delivery service was a good idea --loads of small-format games that you could download and play. If iRiver could put together a reasonable content delivery system for grownup-themed games (i.e. Plug in your handheld, click "put Super Soduku on my machine", pay two bucks, give the developer one buck), they might get somebody's attention.
Basically make iTunes for games.
But it probably won't happen.
This probably will be targeted secondarily as a game machine. Since it runs WMP, it'll be pushed primarily as the latest new ultimate music/video player for your pocket. It's got 800x480 resolution and 4 or 8 gig of memory, so it'll be priced well out of the range of kids. The new Cybiko it ain't.
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| 2006 and I still don't have a hover-car | |
Posted - 1/1/2006 9:17:14 AM | Happy new year to all.
This is also my 15th wedding anniversary, so congratulate me on that. Shelly and I don't have any grand plans for today. We'll probably just go out to eat somewhere not too expensive and try to take it easy.
Humanist Hall's library just grew from about three books to over 2,000 thanks to a generous donation, so I might spend some time unboxing and shelving books.
The end is in sight for The Code Zone's commerce stuff. Everything's in place now except for the download page. I decided to make the download page require your username and code to download games. This is for two reasons.
- There's no point downloading a full game unless you've got the unlock code. Since the online Flash version gives you enough of the game, I'm not making a "one hour version" or "seven day version" or anything like that. I might make one for the download sites, but I'm only distributing the full version here.
- It should save on bandwidth if I don't have a bunch of people downloading the game who can't unlock it.
So it's happening. I really don't like being a server kind of guy. I'm good at writing games. I need to stick with that.
Maggie had a play-day with her Clariden pal Sage yesterday, so Shelly and I went to see "King Kong". Boy, whatta ride that was. Yeah, it's three hours long, but I didn't feel like it was draggy anywhere. Highly recommended.
<simpsons-comic-book-guy>
On the whole, I was pretty disappointed in the year movie-wise. The new Harry Potter was pretty good, and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" wasn't the train-wreck that the remake of "Planet of the Apes" was. Other than that, nothing really interested me at all.
Star Wars 3 limped that trilogy to a finish and tied with "Alien Versus Predator" for the honor of film franchise that least needed to be revisited.
While some will cite the Ed Woodesque dialogue, the lamest Episode 3 moment was the first 15 minutes, which involved a main character pursuing and killing a giant kung-fu robot. This entire sequence makes no damn sense unless you happened to watch the made-for-cable Star Wars cartoon that came out between episodes 2 and 3.
And, just in case sci-fi geeks needed to further prove that their taste is in question, they voted that crapfest as number 243 on the IMDB's list of best movies ever, ahead of Network, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the original Planet of the Apes, and Doctor Zhivago.
. . .but I digress.
Funniest "King Kong" moment came before the movie during the trailer for "Da Vinci Code". Their attempts at making Tom Hanks look young are hilarious. He's supposed to be playing a guy in his twenties, so they dyed his hair black and teased it up and caked him in makeup. It's an unforgettable image.
Reminds me of the scene in Howard Stern's Private Parts where Howard (after having two young actors playing him as a kid) plays himself as a college student. Just as you see him, Howard-as-narrator comes on and says "I know I seem a little too old to be in College. But for this movie you've gotta suspend disbelief".
They should probably open the Da Vanci Code movie with that line :)
</simpsons-comic-book-guy>
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