Literary vivisection

I know that the following will be frowned upon by several of my mates and probably most of the other people reading this post as well, but listen to my reasoning before passing judgement.

Last night I logged into Google Ads and customized my preferences. Yes, I willingly and freely submitted personal information about myself to an ad-agency. Now, wipe up that beverage you just spewed over your keyboard and hear me out. Google ads are absolutely prolific. I can’t open an android application, the android market itself or visit almost any site on the net without seeing them.

Sure, I could install the various adblockers that are available but I won’t ever do that. Most of the sites I visit are free, they remain free (and in business) because they display ads. If I deprive them of that meager income then I contribute to their downfall, and I just won’t do that. If you think it’s moral and ethical then more power to you, I don’t.

With that out of the way; since I’m going to be seeing these ads no matter where I go, why wouldn’t I want them to be tailored to my own preferences? I want ads that are relevant to my interests and geographical region. Skin moisturizer cream available only in Canada really isn’t what I want or need to see.

There’s been a constant “privacy is sacred” debate brewing on the net for as long as I can remember and I find it a bit silly. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a stalwart defender of privacy when it comes to areas that actually matter. Illegal surveillance and profiling needs to be fought, period (and that includes using tracking cookies/sessions for anything -but- ads). But what the heck does it matter if Google knows I want ads about certain genres of games? What nefarious deeds can they perform with that information? I’ll tell you what they can do, and it might shock you.. they can show me ads about the things that interest me. That’s it. And you know what? That’s just fine in my book. In fact, I’ll underline the fact and show you my interests below. Are any of you going to exploit this knowledge in some diabolical way? No? Didn’t think so.

PS: How many of you have facebook accounts? Aye, that’s my point.

I can’t actually remember what the last steam halloween sale included but this one is just mindboggling. It includes a good chunk of the games I consider “essential” and “must haves”. Let me list them quickly in the order I consider they should be bought.

1. Scratches: Director’s cut, my favorite adventure game.
2. Penumbra collector’s pack, my favorite series of all time.
3. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. bundle, shame it didn’t include stalker 2 though.
4. Amnesia – The dark descent, fantastic game by the makers of Penumbra. Better in most ways.
5. Sherlock Holmes – The awakened, Holmes and Cthulhu? Yes please.
6. Dead space bundle, the first one was a great game but the sequel is bordering perfection.
7. Bioshock, pretty much unique, shame the sequel didn’t quite live up to the legacy.
8. Vampire: The masquerade – Bloodlines, absolutely exquisite action rpg.

There’s other great games in the sale but those are the ones you can’t afford to miss.

I’ve been randomly creating sometimes useful, often times not, electronics since my grandfather started learning me at the tender age of 7. During my teens I exuded not just blood and sweat but also a fair amount of tears trying to get various microprocessors chugging the way I wanted them to. As the cost of computers and “proper” CPUs dropped in price I saw little point in continuing my hobby and it fell to the wayside, at least it had plenty of company over there.

During the years I’ve heard people mention the open-source Arduino project but I never had the time nor the inclination to resume my old hobby. I do wish I had at least looked into it. My very own Arduino uno arrived in the mail today, made by the Italian heroes and triple quality checked by the same. I was.. well, excited doesn’t even begin to describe it.

With all haste I extracted, and dusted, my old box of spare components, ic-chips and random nicknacks. But what should one make first..

Well, the obligatory “get a led to shine prettily” seemed obvious. Turned out that the idea must be so common that not only have the Arduino gang included sample code for the microprocessor but they’ve even included a led on the circuit board itself. But integrated leds aren’t even half as shiny so 20 minutes later (hey, I spent a lot of that time coughing from the excessive amounts of dust accumulated on the box from 10 years of neglect) I ended up with this master-piece.

But that wasn’t enough, it was too basic. Let’s do something a bit.. harder. Yes, I ordered a grip of components along with my Arduino. LCD screens, touchpads, you name it and it was in the box. Another thing, which I didn’t expect to be troublesome, was an 8×8 dual led matrix. Hey, that sounds fun, let’s do that.

Naturally the bloody thing came with zero instructions, it didn’t have a logic or controller chip built-in so all I had to go by was 24 pins. I quickly realized that at least 8 of the pins had to be ground for each line (or row). But what did the other 16 do? 8 for red and 8 for green? Sounds logical but then how the heck do I light up one particular led without lighting the entire row? Yes, my electronics was that rusty..

Finally I realized it was just a matter of selecting the row and then the pin relating to a particular color of that row. Technically the matrix is tri-color since you can light both leds at the same time. It will take some rather voodoo’ish coding to get this to do anything useful with 1kb of dynamic memory allocation but I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. Until then, behold! This evening’s crowning achievement!

Holy smokes and the fire that created it! The day I never thought would arrive has come. Not only are they going to remake the Leisure Suit Larry games (which, by the way, had a large part in teaching me conversational english at the age of sub 10) but they’re also planning to make NEW ones?! Feels like I’ve died and am half-way to nostalgia heaven.

The most important thing, as outlined by the RPS article, is that they’ve acquired the rights. If this remains a fact and Al Lowe is truly in charge of new developments we’ll have a very, very bright future for comedic games. That man is a bloody genius. Alright, enough gushing, go read it yourselves.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/11/cock-a-hoot-leisure-suit-larry-hd/

I’m a big fan of free markets, as everybody who knows me is quite aware of. That’s why I find it utterly fascinating and thrilling to see them thrive in modern video games. Do you know what I found the most entertaining in World of Warcraft? No, it wasn’t the battlegrounds or open world pvp (despite spending most of my time there), it was the auction house. I could generate thousands of golds in a day by strangling the market of a particularly desired ware. Maybe a new recipe had been found and everyone was grinding it? Just a matter of predicting the demand and then assuming control of the supply.

I’m one of those strange people who like the fact that there will be items for real currencies on Diablo 3. In fact, I adore it. If I can save myself from hours of grinding by spending a couple of euros it’s a win-win situation for me. I’m currently trying to sink my teeth into Valve’s trading system in Team Fortress 2. It’s a bit gimped but there is a market there. Since I was on the lookout for strange weapons (they count kills) and had a grip of boxes I decided to buy some keys. But after opening a few crates I realized the chance of getting what I was after was just way too low. So I started trading.

Now, I did my research. There’s a variety of tf2 pricing lists available but I did what I always do; checked the market price for what I was after, and then bid half of its actual worth. Why? Because I had something that was desirable, keys that cost real money, and people are desperately cheap. Man was I ever called a “noob” a lot. But you know what? I got what I wanted for the price I stated. If you’ve got something that is in demand, don’t sell it short or you’re leaving money on the table.

One particular trade comes to mind. A guy was selling a strange knife. I wanted it. The asking price was about 1.5 refined (a type of metal). I stated I would not pay more than 1. He immediately started with “lol noob lolo”. So I restated my price. He continued lol’ing and generally insulting me. So I said “fine, no trade then. have a good day.” At which I closed the trade. It took about a minute, then he asked to trade me again and said; “ok 1.0″. Then I said 0.66 just cause he irked me the first time. This time he was actually quiet, then he accepted. This is just a random example, most of the people I traded with were pleasant enough but they sure were willing to pay out the nose for those keys.

The most common complaint I got about my company’s site was that I was.. well, too wordy. I come from the generation where text was a good, solid indicator of worth. I enjoy reading books so hammering through 15 paragraphs on a website wasn’t anything I even remotely considered problematic. But, visitors are always right, even if most of the internet seems to have developed ADHD in a matter of years.

So, www.digitalevolution.se is totally redone. It’s new, it’s hip, it’s minimal. And the rational behind it? Less is more. Still, there’s upsides to it. I don’t have to maintain wordpress for so bloody many sites anymore, it does look sleeker and it functions perfectly with a codebase entirely of my own devising (and thus to my own liking). Check it out if ever disliked the old site. Do note that there are some place holders, haven’t gotten all the games’ trailers ready yet.

PS: Here’s my two sketches which spawned the design one night when I couldn’t sleep.

(Photo by Becka)

PS: Sorry about the lack of updates, the beta for Invicta Sanguis is taking a lot longer than expected.

Another alpha, this time of the main menu. While making Invicta Sanguis I decided I wouldn’t have the standard 2D backgrounds for my menus. Always found it slightly more interesting when something happens in the background, as opposed to a static image.

Again, this is alpha. There will be more stuff happening when the menu is done. Planning on having some ships enter blink space and such, or at least some interstellar traffic. The music is probably final however, song is called Distress call by a friendly bloke called posthousetuomi. Really rather like it.

Not sure about the name but it will take place in the Pax Regalia universe. Yes, I know, paxregalia.com is down and I haven’t had the time to whip something up yet. I will shortly.

Until then I’ll post some videos of the development of the game. I got a lot of positive and constructive feedback when I did the Screenshot Of The Day for Invicta Sanguis, so why not step it up to outright videos this time around? Ooh, moving pictures gooood.

First up is a pre-alpha version of the basic mechanics. I made this a while ago after having worked on the game for about 5 work days, but I forgot to actually post it to this blog. Yeah, I blame the fact that I’ve moved back to OSX and I haven’t found a solid wordpress client yet. Sigh, livewriter, I miss you.

I’m going to be making extensive use of Raknet’s proxy capabilities in my next game, but it appears there was a slight bug in its code. If you’ve compiled it and attempt to use the password switch (-i) then you’re probably being confronted with the message;

“Parsing error, incorrect parameters”

What you need to do is edit ProxyServer.cpp, find the line;

“peer->SetIncomingPassword(argv[i+1], strlen(argv[i+1]));”

Simply add “i++;” to the line after it and everything should work nicely. It appears someone simply forgot to increase the argc check by 2 instead of 1 (argv[1] = switch, argv[2] = switch data).