Virtual Kingdoms

Do not worry I am still working on KQ the Betrayer. Recently I have been doing a lot of mapwork which is quite a time intensive process. It makes me think that if I were to ever work on a new game I would seriously look into procedural level generation.

I read a lot of comments about the release of the Silver Lining Ep 1 and one that stuck out to me went along these lines: The narrator tells you that you really do not want to explore the basement, when you are clicking on it for expressly that purpose. i.e. The narrator shouldn’t tell you what you want to do.
I am definitely guilty of thinking along those lines for KtB. I thought it would help a little in creating a sense of urgency to your task at hand. But mostly it comes into the laziness of the developer who didn’t put that area in. So I decided maybe I should add some extra detail not that its necessary, but it hopefully will make the game world feel more complete and “alive”. But it takes time to do. Perhaps I will go back and add more detail, and side quests once the main story is finally finished.

A little while ago I put together a small graphical python tool to help in the creation of monsters for The Betrayer. (It was also for a University project). It isn’t much but it displays all the information for a monster in an easier to read(and to edit) format then the game’s data files. Eventually I will need to go back through KtB from the beginning and create monsters for the whole game. Which is not something I am looking forward to. This tool will make that process a lot easier. It currently hides in the trunk/data/editor folder on svn. It is released under the GPLv2 and with some small modification will work for KQLives’ monsters as well.
Items are currently hard coded in the source of the game so adding or removing items will cause a lot of havoc. Hopefully all items will eventually be moved to Lua scripts. Of course then I would have to write an item editor as well. A Free/Open Source developer’s work is never done.

Phoenix Online Studios has finally released their first Episode of the The Silver Lining. Which used to be called King’s Quest IX the Silver Lining, until they were forced to change the name. Episode 1 is the first of 5 episodes which are supposedly going to be released from now till next year. From what I hear Episoed 1 is more like an overhyped tech demo with 10 minutes of gameplay. Not mention having a highly annoying narrator. I have not downloaded it because you need to have an account in order to get it. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but guess what the member’s area is called? The Phoenix Online Fan Club. Once again the arrogance of this group shows through. Word on the street says they are looking at making a commercial project after this. And what better way to harvest email addresses to spam later. In the past they have posted several articles how to make a game before they released anything more than a buggy demo. When they were looking for beta testers, they created a fake demo with intentionally added bugs. It’s not like their demo was bug free to begin with. It seems after 8 years of development I think I can wait some more before I have any desire to try it out.

I tried the demo for Supreme Commander 2 this week. And man what a let down. It’s like Square and GPG turned an original novel into a mass market paperback romance. The first mistake: you have to have Steam to download the demo. I can see why GPG is worried about piracy. But its the demo for crying out loud. And then guess whats next you are forced to watch nearly a whole minute of company logo animations. You better be able to skip it in the real

Their technology tree is the only thing that differentiates it from a futuristic Command and Conquer clone. You cant even queue up units if you don’t have the resources available. You can set a factory to repeat but sometimes you just want 20 light tanks then 5 AA, 45 Heavy tanks. I guess that is too complicated for the average mass gamer. (Which are who they are obviously shooting for. Definitely not fans of SupCom 1. And fans of Total Annihilation well… there’s a reason TA still has an active community.) Engineers can not help others to build structures and only 3 engineers can assist a factory at a time.

There are no tiers either. You have to research technology in order to get unit upgrades as well as the severely weakened experimental units. I really get bored of researching the same techs every single game. Like in WC3 and AOE. They change it up a little bit by having a lot of a choices and having to research the proper prerequisites. Apparently the majority of the gameplay for multiplayer is planning which techs to research first.

The strategic map view is pretty much pointless. Partly because the maps are tiny. The unit textures for the demo at least are super bright and washed out like your playing with model airplanes. I mean bright blue and bright yellow have never went together. The poly count is higher however. And the water doesn’t look half as good as in SupCom1.

Screenshots
Supcom UEF ACU
Supcom 2 UEF ACU
Supcom Waves
Supcom 2 Water

And the story consisted of annoying talking heads bickering. I will still google the cut scenes however.

If you have never played Total Annihilation, Spring or Supreme Commander then maybe this could be a fun game, but for those who have played a real RTS look again. All in all it looks a lot more like a prequel or even a no brand name rip off than a sequel.

I recently uploaded some Winter photos to flickr.

Have a Happy New Year.

I tried out a few lighthearted action games a little while ago. And I enjoyed them immensely.

So I recently heard about a new Lego game in development. Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 is scheduled to be released sometime next year. So I figured I should check out the Lego games they have already released to see if they are as good as I have heard. I found the demos up on Download.com. You can also check Amazon’s pages on Lego PC Games for more information such as screenshots and video. I was able to try the demos for Star Wars II(which are episodes 4-6). Batman and Indiana Jones. The demo for Lego Star Wars I won’t install on XP 64 or Vista, or Windows 7. You have to install it on XP or older and copy it over to the newer OS’s. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones Demos each have a level to play and then the option to free play that level again. Which means you can go through getting all the secrets you missed before with whatever characters you have won up to that point. You can change your character anytime in free play.

The Batman game lets you play as either the heroes or the villains. You also periodically find different suits that give Batman or Robin special powers like demolition suit or magnet shoes. Its good to see a tie with all those old action figures. I always thought they were strange when the tv show never had all those power suits.

In each of the games you can play single player and switch between characters or instead play two player cooperative. Each character has specific moves or powers they can use. To beat a level, one has to switch between these characters in order to play through to end. And there are a lot of secrets to find. Which for me at least are really hard to find. Sometimes you can see a secret area but you have to figure out how to get past the obstacles in front of it.

These games are quite enjoyable. I don’t know why its so funny to watch Chewbacca rip a Lego Storm Trooper’s arms off but it is. The characters have some entertaining moves which allow you to blast your enemies back to bricks. The Star Wars games are older and have some strange bugs and a slight weirdness to the camera views but other than that they run pretty smooth. The graphics look great especially in the batman game. I wonder what it would be like to have a photo realistic Lego game, because they are getting closer to it. Each of the games have similar mechanics but the puzzles are quite different making each enjoyable in its light.

I think Ubuntu would be improved if Canonical took a more democratic approach. Let’s start with an excerpt from Canonical’s mission statement: “To realize the potential of free software in the lives of individuals and organizations by: Delivering the world’s best free software platform.” Ubuntu wants to succeed on the desktop. All in all its actually real people(meaning non-developers) who use and want to use Ubuntu will be what makes it a success.

Every new version of Ubuntu has a few obvious changes. Some recent changes have been the removing of ctrl alt backspace as default, making the update manager automatically start, waiting 60 seconds on shutdown, computer janitor and others. I think that there should be an easy way to vote on these new changes. Having some kind of monthly or bi-monthly poll on Ubuntu’s website, would be a good way to prevent frustration as well as cruft build up. Just because developers think a certain feature is the greatest thing since sliced silicon, doesn’t mean it will be embraced by the community. (Keep in mind I am a FLOSS programmer.) Some of these changes annoy me and some of them are okay. The recent changes that make Ubuntu more like windows or mac should be removed right away. Like the pop up update your system message. Which was even more annoying than on windows because you have to manually close it every time. Luckily they have removed that, but replaced it with something just as bad. They just make the whole update manager pop up. Which is a bad idea for computer-illiterate users. Personally I think its even easier to ignore than the old way. Not many people are going to use buggy clones of proprietary software when they can just get pirated copies just as easy. To really succeed on the desktop Ubuntu must stand out as it’s own by being original, easy to use and stable. Which IMO makes gnome a very good choice. Launchpad is also a very Ubuntu has been pretty good at being original but some things are lacking. Completely hard crashing during a user switch is not a very good advertisement. (Which had to do with the buggy ATI graphics drivers. Which albeit is AMD’s fault. But the OS should catch it before freezing the whole computer.) I think Ubuntu would improve if they were more open and took users input more into account.

Some recent developments in Free Libre Open Source Software lead me to believe there is trouble brewing. With growth comes problems. And it seems many projects aren’t living true to their principles. Instead they are once again just trying to copy proprietary or other software. Some examples. The new version of the Gimp plans to enforce a single window a la PhotoShop design. I sincerely hope they keep an option to have multiwindow mode. It’s a complete abandonment of Gimp legacy as well as Linux heritage.
OpenOffice recently showed off a prototype copying Office’s Ribbon. There was fortunately a loud and angry outcry. But unfortunately that doesn’t mean it wont necessarily happen. The ribbon should be a plugin for those who think that way but forcing that on unwilling users is the exact same thing Microsoft did. Next in line is Firefox new GUI. They appear to be copying chrome this time as well the Ribbon again.

Finally one more troubling example that happened recently. That of Ubuntu disabling ctrl-alt-backspace as default. According to this poll (albeit nonscientific) 88% thought it was a bad idea, yet they did it anyways. Fortunately its still Linux so you can go and change a config file and fix it. Ctrl alt backspace to me is one of the great things about Linux. If X crashes that doesn’t mean the kernel has so there is no need to reboot. For instance I was working on KQ recently and it completely locked up. (You need plain lua to run KQ you know ) I switched to a virtual console ctrl alt F6 and did a killall kq. But unfortunately KQ was stuck in fullscreen mode which left X on a wonderful 320-240 resolution. Trust me it looks great on my 24 inch Monitor. And the screen was locked to a small section so I couldn’t access any menus. With a quick ctrl alt backspace X was restarted and I could go on with my work. The reason behind the change was so people didn’t accidentally lose data. Personally I don’t know how anyone can accidentally hit a keyboard combination as awkward as ctrl alt backspace.

Some of these examples are probably only problems to me but it does make me wonder about the future of some of my favorite FLOSS. It goes back to why Wesnoth is such a good game, its not just a Yet Another (insert name here) Clone. (YAC’s I dub them.) I think that if FLOSS projects really wants to succeed they have to be original as well as functional. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case. Just look at all the horrible Office YACs out there(Office included). There has to be a way to make a word processor that doesn’t make you want to throw your computer off a cliff.

Hopefully this storm will pass but we shall see.

Wow its been a while. Summer’s over and schools back in session. Unfortunately I didn’t accomplish as much this summer as I had hoped to.

Recently I have been playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete brought to you by Good Old Games your neighborly DRM free, digital download, game store. Homm3 is a timeless classic TBS game. You lead your armies around the map collecting resources. With those resources you can recruit creatures for your armies at your castles. You can upgrade your cities to give you more resources, upgrade troops or improve your heroes. And then of course vanquish your enemies. It’s a lot of fun fun for $9.99. It comes with a lot of campaigns that are quite difficult. The only problem is that games take a very long time to finish.

There is also a Russian fan made expansion called In the Wake of the Gods. (For some reason I can no longer find the page on google. Just the Russian page shows up. What has google been doing!?) I am surprised about how much they have added. Though it does crash more than the original. (Which still crashes sometimes). A nice thing is that though they have a lot of options most all of them can be disabled if you don’t like that particular feature.

There is a free and open source project called VCMI which is trying to recreate a new engine for HOMM3:WOG. It is not very complete right now. Besides Linux support they plan to add more functionality to HOMM3. This will hopefully allow the mods to add those features that the original engine does not permit.

With the purchase of a new Canon Digital Rebel XSi comes the almost obligatory new flickr account. I have been resisting but with all this fun equipment I might as well share some of the photos. Hopefully I will be good at updating it regularly.